Mount Diablo would look a lot different surrounded by oil derricks. So too would Pinnacles National Park, Henry W. Coe State Park, Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, multiple parks in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and huge swaths of the southern Diablo Range. But with new plans from the Trump administration, that sight could materialize on all these Bay Area lands—along with ample portions of the rest of California, from its oceans to its valleys to its mountains.
How likely is this to actually happen? Here’s our primer on the situation.
Which local areas are being targeted?
In January, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management disclosed plans to facilitate additional oil and gas drilling on more than 700,000 acres of California’s Central Coast region, including slices of Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Monterey, and San Benito counties. Though never closed off to energy extraction, an effective moratorium has been in place on these BLM-administered lands, with no new oil and gas wells developed there for more than 30 years.
The BLM is likewise proposing to open up more of southern California and the Central Valley to oil and gas drilling, including in areas adjacent to Sequoia National Park and Carrizo Plain National Monument. The push is part of the Trump administration’s overall policy of “unleashing American energy,” which also includes expanding offshore drilling off California’s coast. Similar actions are under way in other states.
Does this only affect federal lands?
Mostly, but not entirely. The Center for Biological Diversity, a national conservation nonprofit group, analyzed the proposal and found that the BLM—which controls the subsurface mineral rights on certain lands it doesn’t otherwise manage—could offer leases inside Mount Diablo, Henry W. Coe, and other popular state and regional parks.
The BLM declined an interview request. In a statement emailed by public affairs officer Philip Oviatt, but attributed only to “a BLM spokesperson,” the agency says that “portions of these [state parks] are open for leasing under [the agency’s] current plan.”
Juan Pablo Galván Martínez, senior land use manager at the nonprofit Save Mount Diablo, says the BLM “went for everything they could, regardless of presence of these resources, regardless of whether it’s in a park or not, regardless of sense.”
Get Bay Nature’s Free Weekly Newsletter
Do oil and gas companies really want to drill in the Bay Area?
Matt Woodson, principal research analyst at the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said in an emailed statement that the “complexity and unique nature” of California’s oil fields and the state’s regulatory environment make it “a hard sell for new entrants.”
“Outside of Monterey and Fresno counties, we don’t anticipate there will be a great deal of demand for the potential acreage up for offer within the Central Coast area,” Woodson wrote. “For the broader push to open up public lands, BLM acreage located in Kern County will likely be the most attractive given the proximity to existing infrastructure.”
The BLM downplays the possibility of drilling actually happening within state parks like Mount Diablo and Henry W. Coe. “The reasonably foreseeable development scenario shows very low to no potential for actual leasing or development,” the agency’s statement says. Should leasing occur, measures are in place to protect resources, prevent surface disturbance, and minimize visual impacts and impacts to recreation.
Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, an Oakland-based attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, is frustrated that these plans include parcels that the agency itself acknowledges have no or low oil and gas potential—which she worries could lead to the development of exploratory “wildcat” wells in pristine and populated areas alike.
How much drilling is already happening in the Bay Area?
Fossil fuel extraction here dates back to the 1800s. As of 2014, BLM documents show that more than 4,000 active oil and gas wells and more than 2,000 idle wells dotted California’s Central Coast region (which, as defined by the BLM, lies west of I-5, and runs from San Francisco and Contra Costa counties south to the border with San Luis Obispo County). Most of these wells were in Monterey County and western Fresno County. But there were also nearly 100 active wells across Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties. The Brentwood Field in Contra Costa County, for example, has been producing oil and gas since the 1960s—leading to some conflict between energy companies, municipalities, and homeowners.
But the boom days are long gone. The drop in Bay Area production mirrors the trend across California—which is the eighth-largest oil producing state in the nation. Crude oil generation here has fallen from more than 1 million barrels per day in the early 1980s to 300,000 barrels per day in 2024, and natural gas production has shrunk comparably.
But people are still using fossil fuels—so California now imports more than three-quarters of its crude oil from out of state. This “exposes our state to greater supply disruptions and price volatility,” wrote Elizabeth Graham, CEO of the California Fuels and Convenience Alliance, an industry trade association, in an emailed statement. Without a “stable and reliable in-state fuel supply,” she noted, families and businesses “will face higher prices and greater uncertainty that ripple far beyond the pump, impacting everyday goods, services, and household budgets statewide.”
Meanwhile, the United States is currently producing record amounts of oil, a trend that predates the second Trump administration.
What are the potential environmental and health impacts of drilling?
The BLM’s draft supplemental environmental impact statements assert that new energy development would not significantly impact air quality, water resources, or public health (other than an increased risk of valley fever in certain locales). The agency did not take much of a further look at potential effects to soil, vegetation, wildlife, land use, traffic, tribal and cultural resources, or grazing, saying it had already considered them in prior analyses.
Bogdan Tejeda notes that the acreage in question overlaps with habitat for an array of protected species, from kit foxes to blunt-nosed leopard lizards. She argues the BLM is ignoring the full impacts—including kicked-up dust, toxic wastewater spills, and fragmented mountain lion habitat—that would result from installing new roads, fences, lighting, pads, pipelines, derricks, and other energy infrastructure.
Much of the BLM’s Central Coast efforts are focused on the Diablo Range, a biodiversity hotspot and relatively intact ecosystem that largely lacks formal protection. Without the Diablo Range, Martínez says, California may have trouble reaching its goal of conserving 30 percent of its lands and coastal waters by 2030.
Ashley E. McClure, an Oakland-based primary care physician and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Climate Health Now, says the BLM’s plans underestimate the potential health impacts, particularly in the Central Valley, which already suffers from some of the worst air pollution in the country. “We know this is going to make people sicker,” McClure says.
Can the state (or anybody else) stop drilling from happening on these lands?
The state and local municipalities can take action against drilling. Both Brentwood and Antioch, for example, recently banned new drilling within their city limits. But because these BLM plans cover federal lands (or lands with federal mineral rights), the state has minimal oversight. And some of the protections that do exist are being challenged by the Trump administration. It is suing, for example, to overturn a recent state law that mandates a 3,200-foot buffer zone between new oil and gas wells and homes, schools, and hospitals. According to Bogdan Tejeda, the administration also argues that state environmental laws, such as California’s fracking ban, do not apply on federal lands.
Barring the BLM dropping or changing its plans, litigation from nonprofits—and possibly the state and local governments—is about as certain as death and taxes. In fact, these new plans were drawn up in response to the legal challenges that derailed the first Trump administration’s attempts to ramp up oil and gas drilling in California. Once plans are finalized, the next step would be lease sales, followed by applications for drilling permits. Lawsuits could target these as well. All in all, this long-running, oft-interrupted legal saga has now spanned several presidencies.
Is there anything else that could stop this?
The U.S. Congress could hypothetically place these areas off limits to drilling.
How can the public weigh in?
As has historically been required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the BLM is holding public comment periods for both the Central Coast region and southern and central California, which are open until March 13. “We can still try to get BLM on track to improve its decision-making,” Bogdan Tejeda says. “The more pressure on BLM from all levels, the better.”
Get your comments in while you still can. Last month, the Interior Department (which BLM falls under) finalized new rules to NEPA, under which officials will only be required to solicit public comment when issuing a notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact report. Had this been on the books in January, the public might have had no chance to participate in the BLM’s current plans.
The BLM, which must consider the public comments, is expected to release the final drilling plans for California by this summer.
Meanwhile: Offshore drilling plans proceed, too
While the BLM works on opening up California lands, its cousin agency at Interior, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, has moved to expand offshore drilling along the entire California coast and elsewhere—with, as yet, no carveout even for marine sanctuaries. The agency specifically calls for lease sales in the Bay Area, which has no offshore oil rigs currently. The federal government has not offered new leases off the California coast since 1984.
Pete Stauffer, who leads the Surfrider Foundation’s national campaign against offshore drilling, says the entire drilling process, from exploratory seismic blasts that deafen marine mammals to the release of “drilling muds” that pollute the seafloor to the inevitable oil spills, would devastate the environment, and impact California’s roughly $40 billion coastal tourism, recreation and fishing industries. Any new drilling would have climate impacts as well, of course.
State officials have mobilized in opposition. Governor Gavin Newsom called it an “idiotic plan [that’s] dead in the water” and wondered why it excluded the ocean off Mar-a-Lago. In January, he and the governors of Washington and Oregon submitted a joint comment letter in opposition.
Offshore extraction won’t occur in California’s jurisdiction: the state has a decades-old drilling moratorium in its waters, which extend three miles from shore, and dozens of California cities and counties have passed resolutions opposing new offshore drilling. Moreover, state agencies could refuse to permit oil and gas infrastructure. Some environmental advocates worry, however, that companies could transport oil directly from rigs in federal waters to waiting tankers and bypass state restrictions altogether.
The offshore drilling plan’s first comment period has closed. There will be another comment period in coming months. Lawsuits from the state, environmental groups, and others are almost inevitable here, too. Barring congressional action against offshore drilling, Stauffer advocates for using “every tool in the toolbox to try and stop it.”
Update, March 17, 2026: References to Victoria Bogdan Tejeda were corrected. Her surname is Bogdan Tejeda, not Tejeda.
