The Santa Barbara County in California rejected this week a proposal from ExxonMobil to transport oil via tanker trucks that would have been a step toward restarting three oil platforms offshore Santa Barbara in federal waters. The pipeline owned by Plains All American Pipeline, which used to transport oil from the three platforms ruptured in 2015, causing a major spill and forcing ExxonMobil to suspend production from the three platforms. As an interim solution, the U.S. supermajor applied in 2017 for an interim trucking permit from Santa Barbara County that would allow temporary transport of crude to market and allow a phased restart of the Santa Ynez Unit (SYU) facilities, consisting of an onshore oil and natural gas processing facility near Goleta, California, as well as three offshore platforms — Hondo, Heritage, and Harmony. Exxon’s plan was to use up to 24,820 tanker trucks annually on the 101 Freeway […]