Workers with Patriot Environmental Services clean up oil that flowed into the Talbert Marsh in Huntington Beach, California on Sunday, Oct. 3, 2021. Authorities said 126,000 gallons of oil leaked from the offshore oil rig Elly on Saturday. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times/TNS) MYUNG J. CHUN/TNS
By Connor Sheets, Robert J. Lopez, Rosanna Xia and Adam Elmahrek / Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — The owner of an offshore oil operation that spewed at least 126,000 gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean and fouled Orange County beaches had emerged from bankruptcy just four years ago and amassed a long record of federal noncompliance incidents and violations.
As divers for Houston-based Amplify Energy Corp. on Sunday searched for the location and cause of the massive leak, public records revealed a pattern of changing ownership and compliance warnings for the company. Amplify had also been working to upgrade its aging infrastructure and had plans to initiate new drilling near the site of the leak in the final three months of this year, according to company records. It remains unclear whether the drilling had commenced or whether the work was connected to the leak.
Government officials say the spill originated from a broken pipeline off the coast of Huntington Beach that runs from the Port of Long Beach to a production and processing platform called Elly, located in the Beta Field, an accumulation of oil nine miles from the California coast. Drilling in the Beta Field, discovered by a consortium led by Shell Oil Co. in 1976, began in 1980 and oil production started in January 1981.
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The exact cause of the leak remains unclear. But the devastating scope of the spill is already renewing calls for the government to take more aggressive action against the aging oil platforms that dot the Southern California coast. Environmental groups have raised the alarm for years about the condition of some of the systems and what they consider a lack of oversight.
In 2018, Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, and other environmental advocates took part in a fact-finding cruise along the California coast to inspect about a dozen oil platforms, some more than 40 years old. They saw rusted pipes and equipment and used an optical gas imaging camera to document flaring incidents on several platforms, she said.
“So much of that infrastructure is old and corroded,” Sakashita said. “[The platforms] should have been decommissioned. … It’s not a robust system of oversight.”
