The Center for American Prosperity & Energy (CAPE) supports the U.S. Department of Energy’s recent Pipeline Capacity Prioritization and Allocation Order, including the decision to allow production to resume from the offshore California Santa Ynez Unit, as a necessary and timely step to strengthen America’s energy security and economic resilience.
At a moment when global supply chains remain vulnerable—including disruptions tied to instability in critical transit chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz—ensuring reliable domestic energy production is not optional; it is a core national priority. Secretary Wright’s directive to restore production and prioritize the use of existing pipeline infrastructure reflects a simple but essential reality: American energy should move on American infrastructure to serve American consumers.
For too long, California has embodied a costly contradiction—maintaining some of the highest energy demand in the country while importing a significant share of its oil from foreign sources. That dependence exposes families, businesses, and even military installations to unnecessary risk when global markets become unstable. Allowing production to resume begins to correct that imbalance by restoring critical domestic production capacity. The Santa Ynez Unit has the potential to produce tens of thousands of barrels per day, yet for years that capacity has been stranded, not by a lack of resources or infrastructure, but by a heavily red-taped California regulatory regime that has made timely operation impossible. When infrastructure that already exists, has already been built, and has already been permitted cannot be used because it is subject to duplicative review by multiple state regulatory agencies with no clear coordination or endpoint, the result is not careful governance, it is delay, uncertainty, and forced dependence on foreign supply. Allowing that infrastructure to operate as intended reduces those bottlenecks, limits reliance on imports, and strengthens economic and national security.
Just as importantly, the Order reinforces a broader principle: infrastructure matters. Energy production without the ability to transport that energy to consumers is stranded potential. By prioritizing pipeline capacity and allocation, the Department of Energy is helping ensure that American resources can reach American markets—reducing volatility, improving reliability, and making the entire system more resilient.
This moment also underscores a broader need to address regulatory fragmentation, like the bureaucratic morass that California has created, that prevents domestic energy systems from functioning as designed. Expanding domestic energy production, supporting critical infrastructure, and reducing exposure to foreign supply shocks are not partisan goals. They are foundational to American prosperity. That requires a durable, rules-based framework, not one where critical infrastructure can be indefinitely stalled by a state government’s desire to impose ever-expanding, unmoored regulatory authority with no goal in sight other than empowering the regulators themselves. CAPE looks forward to continued efforts to remove unnecessary barriers to responsible energy production and infrastructure development, and to support policies that protect and strengthen American economic security.