Chevron Plans Circuitous Route for Oil Shipments

Where there’s a will--and enormous investment--there’s a way. In this case, a very long way.

Chevron Corp. said Thursday that after years of permit Ping-Pong with environmentalists, politicians and coastal planners, it has begun to ship oil from the giant Point Arguello offshore oil drilling project on a circuitous, ungainly route--by pipeline from Santa Barbara to Kern County to Martinez in the Bay Area and then, quite probably, back down the coast in double-hulled tankers to Los Angeles refineries.

The original idea in the late 1970s was to transport the oil a short stretch south to the Los Angeles area from one of the largest petroleum fields ever found in the United States to the world’s largest gasoline marketplace. But that was before opposition dug in to the partners’ pipeline route and tankering plans. Years of lawsuits, hearings and proposals later, Chevron will take the scenic route.

“If we can’t tanker it or send it through a pipeline, we can’t very well fax it,” allowed Michael Marcy, a Chevron spokesman.

Chevron and its partners in the venture will pump 20,000 barrels a day north, half of which is Chevron’s. After the company sells up to 3,000 of those barrels to a Bay Area asphalt company, it will determine where economics dictate shipping the rest.

“We’re not sure yet, but that may be to refineries in the Los Angeles Basin,” Marcy said, “including ours at El Segundo, where we wanted the stuff in the first place.”

Chevron would expect to send one 200,000- to 250,000-barrel tanker south each month. But even that lone ship may find itself in hazardous waters.

“They’d better not do that,” warned a surprised Dianne Owens, chair of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, a prime antagonist.

“They promised us they would refine it up in Northern California,” Owens said. She has yet to plot a countermove.

“But we’ll find one,” she said.