“The question in my mind is: The fracking ban, the buffer zone, all that stuff, does that apply?” Sivas said. “Is there a state regulation that could layer on top of the federal lands? And I don’t know the answer to that question because there hasn’t been a lot of litigation around this.”

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Sivas has litigated environmental cases in the state for decades, including helping Indigenous tribes protect the Sáttítla Highlands from geothermal development. From her perspective, the BLM proposals just aren’t economically viable.

“It’s really hard to get oil out of the ground in this area,” Sivas said of California’s Central Coast. “We’ve depleted the easy stuff, like at the San Arto oil field in Monterey.”

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For that reason, Sivas predicts that large corporations like ExxonMobil and Chevron aren’t likely to bid on a lease. Instead, she says bids will likely come from smaller companies, which may not realize “just how hard it is and expensive it is to get oil out of the ground in California.”