Trump Is Said to Propose Opening California Coast to Oil Drilling

The Trump administration plans to allow new oil and gas drilling off the California coast for the first time in roughly four decades, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The move would set up a confrontation with Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has fought offshore drilling and who has emerged as one of President Trump’s chief political antagonists. The governor is in Brazil for the United Nations climate summit, where he is drawing a contrast between himself and Mr. Trump, who denigrates efforts to fight global warming.

The Interior Department could announce the proposal as soon as this week, according to the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

When asked about the proposal on Tuesday, Mr. Newsom rolled his eyes and said it would be “dead on arrival in California.”

There has been almost no fossil fuel development along the California coast since an enormous oil spill near Santa Barbara in 1969 that shocked the nation and helped to galvanize a national environmental movement. The spill sullied beaches in the popular coastal enclave, killed thousands of birds, damaged property and harmed the commercial fishing industry.

Since then, drilling has been prohibited in California state waters, which extend three miles from the shoreline. There has been limited drilling, and no new leasing, in federal waters off California since the mid-1980s.

The plan would also require new oil and gas leasing in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, which Mr. Trump is calling the Gulf of America. That could prompt pushback from Republicans from Florida, who have opposed new drilling there ever since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig disaster devastated the state’s tourism industry.

Elements of the proposal were reported earlier by The Washington Post and Politico. Representatives for the Interior Department and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The proposed lease sales in the Pacific Ocean would primarily be off Santa Barbara County, Calif., where a small amount of drilling is already occurring, according to two of the people familiar with the Interior Department’s draft plan.

The Texas-based oil company Sable Offshore is seeking to reactivate three drilling rigs in federal waters off Santa Barbara that have largely sat idle since a 2015 oil spill. In May, the company began producing oil from one of those rigs under an existing lease.

Yet the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, sued Sable Offshore last month, accusing the company of illegally discharging waste into local waterways. Mr. Newsom also sent a letter to the Interior Department in June reiterating the state’s “continued opposition” to additional fossil fuel development.

“Expensive and riskier offshore drilling would put our communities at risk and undermine the economic stability of our coastal economies,” Tara Gallegos, a spokeswoman for Mr. Newsom, wrote in an email.

Still, analysts said that oil and gas companies are unlikely to have much interest in expanding drilling off California.

Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston-based investment firm, said he expected energy companies to snap up the additional leases in the Gulf off Louisiana and Texas, where drilling infrastructure is already plentiful. The U.S. offshore oil industry produces around 1.8 million barrels of oil per day, largely from the Gulf.

“That’s where the preponderance of interest will be,” Mr. Pickering said. “California is going to have either no interest or very low interest, with a much smaller subset of players.”

Mr. Trump’s signature tax and spending bill, enacted in July, mandated at least 36 oil and gas lease sales in federal waters, including 30 in the Gulf and six in Cook Inlet, Alaska. The 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act also requires the government to update a plan for offshore oil and gas leasing every five years.

The latest plan, which was finalized by the Biden administration, offered the fewest offshore oil and gas leases in U.S. history, restricting drilling to just three new areas in the Gulf. Biden administration officials at the time argued that the threat of climate change obliged the United States to curb fossil fuel development and rapidly transition to renewable energy.

Mr. Trump, who has called green energy a “scam,” has enacted an aggressive agenda to ramp up the production and use of fossil fuels.

It could take the Trump administration at least a year to finalize the draft plan, at which point environmental groups could challenge it in court.

“We oppose any expansion of offshore drilling and we are deeply concerned about the possibility of millions of acres of coast being opened up, and the oil spills and devastation that could come of that,” said Joseph Gordon, the director of campaigns for Oceana, a conservation group.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, the Interior Department initially proposed to open nearly all U.S. coastal waters to drilling. But, in response to concerns from Republicans in the Southeast who worried that oil spills could damage tourism and fishing, the agency enacted a moratorium on drilling off Florida, Georgia and South Carolina through 2032.

Senators Ashley Moody and Rick Scott, Republicans of Florida, last month introduced legislation that would codify the moratorium into law. “I will always work to keep Florida’s shores pristine and protect our natural treasures for generations to come,” Mr. Scott said in a statement.

It was unclear whether the draft plan would allow drilling in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida and South Carolina. Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in June saying that his state’s coastline was “one of the most pristine in the country, and offshore drilling is simply not in its best interest.”

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from Belem, Brazil.