By Emily Cadel and Monica Vaughan | Sacramento Bee
California, the third-largest oil producing state in the nation, on Wednesday, January 24, 2018, sued the Trump administration to reinstate an Obama-era rule governing
The Trump administration moved forward Thursday with its plan to open up federal land in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast to more oil and gas drilling, including fracking.
The Bureau of Land Management Central Coast Office released new documents on its proposal for oil and gas leasing and development on the public land it administers. The field office’s boundaries stretch across 11 California counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Merced, Monterey, San Benito, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Stanislaus.
The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that opposes the plan, estimates that the proposal could open up roughly 725,000 acres of federally managed land and subsurface mineral estate to oil and gas leasing.