The Bureau of Land Management has approved updated resource management plans that reopen the door to future oil and gas leasing on federal lands across California. Those plans, announced this week, cover federal lands in 18 counties across the Central Coast, Central Valley, and Southern California.
Federal officials say the updates are part of the Trump administration's effort to expand domestic energy production and implement the administration's broader energy agenda on public lands.
The decision does not authorize new drilling. Instead, the plans allow the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to restart its federal oil and gas leasing program.
Before any new leases are issued, companies must first bid on the parcels they want to lease. The agency would then conduct a separate environmental review for each proposed lease sale, followed by an opportunity for public comment.
"This plan that we signed yesterday is just the foundational piece," said Gabe Garcia, the BLM's Central California district manager. "It gives us the ability to move forward and initiate these lease sales."
Garcia said the agency plans to begin the leasing process quickly, but emphasized that each lease sale will require its own environmental review before any development can move forward.
He also said the agency expects interest from the oil industry to focus on areas near existing oil fields rather than undeveloped public lands. In California, most federal oil and gas production occurs in Kern County.
Garcia said the administration believes expanding domestic production could reduce California's reliance on imported oil.
"There's oil that we use in California that is imported from a lot of different countries," Garcia said. "The administration is driving to give people the opportunity to produce more oil here in California on federal land so that we can help with the need for our state."
Environmental organizations criticized the decision and said they are preparing another legal challenge.
Cooper Kass, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said expanding oil and gas leasing threatens public health, wildlife and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He also warned that additional development could worsen California's growing backlog of idle and orphan oil wells, leaving taxpayers responsible for cleanup costs when companies fail to plug abandoned wells.
The Center for Biological Diversity has previously challenged earlier versions of the federal land management plans in court.
The Bureau of Land Management received roughly 60,000 public comments during the planning process, according to Garcia. Of those, about 319 were considered unique and substantive comments that the agency addressed in the final environmental documents.
The agency has not announced when its first lease sale under the updated plans will occur, but Garcia said additional environmental review and public comment opportunities will take place before any leases are offered.
