Race News

Platform Hondo, idle since 2015 alongside Harmony and Heritage, is expected to resume production in June at more than 10,000 barrels a day. In race terms, that turns the Santa Ynez group into a three-platform scoring bloc and starts adding to Hondo’s barrel total for the first time in over a decade. Hondo sits in the deepest water of any competitor in the Channel — a detail that is, for once, briefly relevant.

On April 17, a Santa Barbara judge found that the restarted platforms were operating in noncompliance with a standing injunction and rejected the operator’s bid to lift it, ruling that the federal restart order did not excuse the missing state permits.

In race terms, the leaders are now producing — and scoring — under formal protest. Their barrels still count toward the standings; whether they should is the question now in front of the court. For the communities that brought the challenge, the permits were never paperwork. They are the difference between a pipeline that is watched closely and one that is not.

On March 29, oil from Platform Harmony was sold for the first time in nearly eleven years — and with it, Harmony retook the overall lead in the Regatta. The race ranks its competitors two ways: how many of the four coastal checkpoints they have reached, and how many barrels of oil they have produced in their lifetime. Every barrel Harmony sells adds to the second number. On Sunday she added about 22,000 of them.

The eleven years Harmony spent shut in turn out to favor her. Pressure builds inside a sealed oil reservoir over time; the longer the wells stay closed, the harder the oil pushes when they reopen. Harmony’s wells have been building that pressure since 2015. Analysts had called the figure “considerable.” At 22,000 barrels a day and rising, it appears they were not exaggerating.

It is worth remembering what put Harmony on the sidelines in the first place. The pipeline now carrying her oil is the one that ruptured near Refugio State Beach in 2015, spilling an estimated 120,000 gallons into the Santa Barbara Channel — killing marine mammals and seabirds, closing fisheries, and fouling more than a hundred miles of coast. It is the same pipeline, carrying the same oil. Those barrels move through water that gray whales migrate across and sea otters live in: the Channel this race is named for, and the reason any of it is worth paying attention to.

Harmony has not commented.

On March 23, the California Attorney General sued to challenge the federal order that had sent Harmony, Heritage, and Hondo back into production ten days earlier. At issue is whether a single Cabinet secretary, invoking a 1950 wartime law, can override a state’s authority over the oil pipelines on its own coast.

For the race, the suit raises an unusual question: three of the leading competitors are scoring under rules a court may yet undo. The platforms continue to produce while the case proceeds, and the standings continue to reflect it. The state, and the residents lined up behind it, are less concerned with the standings than with what a restarted pipeline means for the water it runs beside.

On March 13, a federal order issued under the Defense Production Act of 1950 directed three Regatta competitors — Platform Harmony, Platform Heritage, and Platform Hondo — to resume production. In a race scored in part on barrels produced, an order to start producing again is, in effect, an order to start scoring again. All three had been idle since 2015.

The competitive stakes are difficult to overstate. The three platforms had spent eleven years shut in, and a shut-in well does not rest quietly — pressure builds inside a sealed reservoir the longer it stays closed. Race analysts have described the pressure accumulated across the three platforms as the largest in the Channel’s recorded history. The wells are primed.

The order arrived over the objection of nearly everyone who lives with its consequences. The pipeline that will carry this oil is the one that ruptured near Refugio State Beach in 2015, spilling an estimated 120,000 gallons into the Santa Barbara Channel. The communities along this coast did not ask for it to carry crude again, and many of them said so plainly. The Channel is a migration corridor for gray and blue whales and a home for sea otters and the kelp forests that shelter hundreds of species. It is also the water this entire race is named for.

The three platforms have offered no comment, which is consistent with their general communication style.