Local, Federal Oil Drilling Policies Diverge in California
Los Angeles officials and the Bureau of Land Management took actions last week that split the direction of regional policy on oil drilling operations in California.
Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday voted unanimously to expedite plans for a proposed citywide oil and gas drilling ordinance that would prohibit new oil and gas extraction and make existing extraction activities a nonconforming use in all zones.
Posed as a re-adoption of the city’s 2022 oil drilling ordinance, the regulations would require operators of non-conforming oil well sites to cease operations and terminate them within 20 years, with wells left idled for one year given terminated status, according to a Mitigated Negative Declaration released in November.
“Getting to this point took years of work,” Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, the main driver of the policy, said in the June 23 meeting. “In 2022, the city council voted to adopt an ordinance putting LA on a path to phase out oil drilling … but big oil challenged our authority, arguing that state law pre-empted us from engaging in this important work.”
Oil companies in the state sued Los Angeles in 2022. A California superior court judge considered the law invalid in 2024, holding that local cities are pre-empted by state law from regulating oil extraction practices. In compliance with the 2024 ruling, the City of Los Angeles rescinded the regulation in May 2025.
The ordinance does not affect pipelines intended for hydrocarbon transportation, service stations, abandoned wells, refineries and wells operated by public utility companies regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission, according to the November report.
Assembly Member Dawn Addis’ Assembly Bill 3233, which granted local governments statutory authority in January 2025 to limit oil and gas operations within their jurisdictions, allowed the measure to re-emerge, said Yaroslavsky.
The ordinance is anticipated to return to City Council later this summer. The next step is for the City Attorney to present the ordinance for further committee and council consideration, the office of the Los Angeles Clerk said.
The renewed ordinance faced backlash from California refiners and industry stakeholders. Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, a Los Angeles-based law firm representing the Western States Petroleum Association, voiced its concerns about the ordinance in a June 22 letter. The firm said adopting the ordinance would violate private property and vested oil and gas producer rights, as well as disturb due process. It also noted that the city cannot bypass state constitutional limits using the state legislature through AB 3233.
“Given the significant and material defects in the Ordinance and the lack of any meaningful environmental review conducted to support the Ordinance, we strongly urge the City to decline to adopt the Ordinance and abandon its unlawful and baseless efforts to restrict lawful, permitted use of oil and gas facilities within the City,” the law firm’s letter read.
Yaroslavsky said the oil industry “will continue to fight us at every turn” in the Tuesday meeting. “…but we’ve done the work,” she said. “The work, of course, does not end here. This is one chapter. There are other tools that are available to help reach our shared goal of eliminating urban oil drilling from our communities and I’m committed to using them.”
On the other end of the spectrum, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a decision the same day that will resume the oil and gas leasing process in its Bakersfield field office, affecting eight counties in south-central California.
“The effort is consistent with Secretary’s Order 3418, which supports federal direction to expand domestic energy opportunities. The order emphasizes the responsible development of oil, natural gas, coal, strategic minerals, and alternative energy resources on public lands in a manner that is efficient, affordable, and reliable,” the Bureau said on Tuesday.
The BLM Bakersfield Field Office handles roughly 400,000 acres of public land and 1.2 million acres of federal mineral estate in central California, the bureau said.
Reporting by Shaheer Naveed, snaveed@opisnet.com; Editing by Bayan Raji, braji@opisnet.com