Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jane Fonda oppose drilling at the site of a big spill a decade ago. But golf legend Mickelson says drilling would help clean up Santa Barbara beaches by reducing natural oil seeps.
A dozen times in the past week, golf pro Phil Mickelson has posted on X (formerly Twitter) his support for Sable Offshore, a publicly traded California oil company and its efforts to restart pumping from its oilfield off the Santa Barbara coast. “It’s about energy security, lower costs, jobs, cleaner beaches and a healthier California,” Mickelson wrote.
Cleaner beaches? That’s ironic given that 10 years ago the field in question, called the Santa Ynez Unit, suffered a pipeline rupture. The resulting spill was the worst in California since 1990, fouling 3,700 acres of Santa Barbara beaches and fisheries with about 2,500 barrels of crude oil. At the time of the spill, the field was operated by ExxonMobil. But investigators ultimately blamed the spill on untreated corrosion and lack of automatic shutoff valves in a pipeline owned by Plains All-American, which ended up on the hook for $300 million in civil and criminal penalties.
But here’s the other side of the story: For decades scientists have studied natural oil spills occurring continuously in this area from oil seeping out of the ocean floor and washing up on beaches. Numerous studies have found that pumping oil actually reduces natural seepage.
Some anti-oil activists aren’t convinced. Actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jane Fonda have protested against the project, while the Santa Barbara district attorney recently charged Sable with a raft of felonies, alleging the company in 2024 wrongfully disturbed some dirt while repairing an onshore section of pipeline and knowingly discharged pollutants into a waterway. (Sable denies the charges and is fighting them.)
The Environmental Defense Center calls Sable a “fly-by-night Texas oil company” But it’s not. CEO Jim Flores, 66, has a long history in offshore oil development. In 2013 he sold publicly traded Plains Exploration to Freeport McMoRan for $16 billion. Flores was CEO of Freeport’s oil and gas division until 2016. When he left Freeport, Flores owned shares worth some $130 million. He initially launched the venture Sable Permian to invest in onshore oilfields in Texas. After Sable Permian went bankrupt in 2020 he formed Sable Offshore, and caught on to the SPAC wave, merging in late 2022 with Flame Acquisition. At the time, Flores already had a deal in the works to buy the Santa Ynez field and its three offshore production platforms from ExxonMobil. That $1 billion deal closed in early 2024, with the help of a $625 million loan from Exxon. The field, discovered in 1968, is believed to still have half a billion barrels of recoverable oil remaining beneath 76,000 acres of federally owned waters. If Sable fails, Exxon still backstops the asset. Flores’ 18% of shares in Sable Offshore is now worth $360 million.
The other big backer of Sable is Christopher Sarofim, 62, who now runs Fayez Sarofim & Co., the Houston-based money management empire ($41 billion assets under management) founded by his late billionaire father, a longtime member of the Forbes 400. Sarofim backed the Flame Acquisition SPAC that became Sable and now controls 10% of the company, worth $200 million. Flores and Sarofim are neighbors in Houston’s tony River Oaks neighborhood. (A Sable spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.)
Phil Mickelson, at LIV Michigan, August 2025.
ISI Photos via Getty Images
When Sable took over, it acquired all the suspect pipelines and set to work on repairs, focusing on “hot spots” of corrosion and installing new safety valves. By May 2025 it temporarily restarted production — from the Harmony platform, one of three located two miles off Santa Barbara. If regulators agreed, Sable could return to full-time, full-volume operations at Santa Ynez, flowing more than 50,000 barrels per day.
Sable’s operations drew the attention of local environmentalists and the California Coastal Commission, which issued a cease and desist order to Sable over allegedly unauthorized excavations, which involved the removal of vegetation.
Sable insisted that its work was already authorized under existing federal permits, giving it every permission it needed to maintain and repair its equipment. The State Fire Marshal’s Office signed off on the pipeline work. Santa Barbara County ruled in Sable’s favor.
Cleaning Santa Barbara beaches after the 2015 Refugio oil spill.
Getty Images
But that wasn’t good enough for the California Coastal Commission (CCC), which in April levied $18 million in fines against Sable. At a Santa Barbara rally in March, both Louis-Dreyfus and Fonda spoke out against the company. “I can smell a rat,” Veep star Louis-Dreyfus reportedly said. “And this project is a rat.” Less than a month ago, the Santa Barbara District Attorney brought five felony and 16 misdemeanor charges against Sable alleging environmental violations. (Hat tip to the Santa Barbara Independent for dogged coverage.)
In a statement, Sable said the attacks and indictments were “politically motivated” and insisted it did nothing wrong in “the handling of backfill soil during the repair and maintenance process.” Sable states that “all of the repairs and excavations were supervised by a certified independent biologist and cultural resource professional and the Office of State Fire Marshal personnel. No wildlife were adversely affected.”
Piling on its woes, California Gov. Gavin Newsom in September signed into law SB237. Although the bill seeks to stabilize California’s waning oil industry and even allows expanded drilling in Kern County, it could stymie Sable’s restart efforts because it gives the state authority to force Sable to re-permit the project and rebuild already repaired pipelines to meet “best available technology” — unless, that is, Sable can manage to get all its operations back up and running by a January 1, 2026 deadline.
There is an alternative though. Why pipe the oil ashore if you don’t have to? When oil companies operate in other politically difficult places (like West Africa) where it’s not safe to build pipelines from offshore platforms to shore, they bring in a modified tanker called an FPSO (floating production, storage, and offloading) that sits at anchor near the production platform. Production volumes fill up the FPSO, which gets emptied every few days by barges. Sable has proposed an FPSO-based system. It would cost some $100 million to retrofit the platforms off Santa Barbara, and operating costs of barging crude oil away from the stationary FPSO would add operating costs on the order of $3/bbl. Although Santa Ynez is located in Federal waters, Gov. Newsom and the California Coastal Commission would still have a say in what Sable refers to as “Option 2.”
On September 19th, CEO Flores sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum outlining the FPSO plans. The Trump administration has already expressed its support for a resumption of operations. In July, Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement wrote in a statement that, “Interior anticipates all three platforms in the SYU to be online by the end of 2025, bringing a very successful completion to what has been 10 years of no oil production in the Pacific to essentially full production in just a matter of months, which is an excellent testament to President Trump and Secretary Burgum’s drive towards Unleashing American Energy.”
They have Newsom in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. If he blocks the pipeline restart, Sable goes with option 2. We he to block that, it would trigger Sable to file a multi-billion-dollar takings claim against California. And it would enable Trump to tar Presidential aspirant Newsom as irrationally anti-oil.
Analyst David Decklebaum at TD Securities figures that if all works out, Sable’s annual Ebitda could reach $700 million in a couple years. Sable shares are extremely volatile; at $18 (market cap $1.9 billion) they’re down by a third in the past month. Having raised $290 million in a follow-on stock offering, Sable can endure a couple more quarters of cash burn. Net loss in the second quarter was $128 million. Even assuming it can get operations back up and running, in January, Sable will still need to seek refinancing of notes due to Exxon.
So does Phil Mickelson, 55, #10 on Forbes’ 2025 list of The World’s Highest Paid Golfers, with $40 million in earnings over the previous 12 months, have a financial interest in Sable Offshore? Is Sable paying a fee for his advocacy? No answer so far to Forbes’ repeated requests for comment from either a Sable spokesperson and Mickelson’s agent.
The six-time PGA tour champion, now in the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf League, has said he supports the company because it would be economically good for California, but more importantly because ample scientific study (see Quigley, Luyendyk, Hornafius, Peltonen, et al) backs the belief that sucking oil out of reservoirs beneath the Santa Barbara Channel will bring about “reduced natural oil seepage through the ocean floor.”
In time that may finally bring an end to the tarballs that have been washing up on local beaches and staining feet for generations. “The reason I became involved with Sable Offshore is simple,” tweeted Mickelson. “The data shows it’s a true win-win for California—especially our environment.”