This article was updated on 4/22 to reflect the fact that Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals has not committed to restoring the full 150 acres that were transferred to the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority. While all wells across this site will be plugged and abandoned, the restoration effort is focused on enhancing the portion known as Steamshovel Slough and about 30 acres directly adjacent to it.
A High-Stakes Gamble in Long Beach’s Forgotten Marsh
By Emma Rault, Community Reporter
The Los Cerritos Wetlands are full of contradictions. Great egrets proudly stand guard in front of nodding pumpjacks in a historic landscape that, despite a century of heavy industrial use, is still teeming with resilient life.
These wetlands were once part of a sprawling marsh at the mouth of the San Gabriel River that totaled more than 2,400 acres. Following Euro-American arrival, large swaths were drained and filled for development and agriculture. Today, some 500 acres remain.
Like many other waterways in the American West, the river was channelized — encased in concrete — for flood control in the early 20th century. Along with the discovery of crude oil reserves around the same time, this dramatically changed and degraded a once-pristine ecosystem.
Last month, the California Coastal Commission approved a plan to restore the southern area of the wetlands.
The restoration has been decades in the making. It is spearheaded by the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority (LCWA), a government entity made up of the Cities of Long Beach and Seal Beach, the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, and the State Coastal Conservancy — which last year earmarked $32 million in funding for the project.
At the Coastal Commission hearing, the LCWA — and various supporters, such as Long Beach District 3 Councilmember Kristina Duggan, Friends of Ballona Wetlands, and the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust — celebrated the plan as an exciting step forward.
But other wetland advocates — the Sierra Club’s Los Cerritos Wetlands Task Force, Puvunga Wetlands Protectors, and several tribal leaders — are concerned about the project, describing it as “greenwashing” due to the relationship between the restoration efforts and ongoing oil extraction.
Trading increased oil production for wetlands protection
In recent years, wetlands have gained growing appreciation. These rare and vital ecosystems house endangered species, filter pollutants, provide flood and erosion control, offer valuable open space to city dwellers, and combat climate change by being particularly good at storing and capturing carbon.
The Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority was formed in 2006 and took on the mission of restoring the wetlands, a cause first championed by grassroots community organizations.
Then, in 2015, a company called Synergy Oil got involved.
Synergy Oil had bought a property in the northern part of Los Cerritos Wetlands from the Bixby Land Company after its heir, Mark Bixby — along with local developers Tom Dean and Jeff Berger, who owned part of the wetlands — died in a plane crash in 2011.
Synergy’s CEO, John McKeown, proposed an idea: the company would combine the restoration of some of the wetlands with relocated and increased oil production elsewhere on the site.
To be more precise: Synergy sought to retire 74 old wells on its large parcel in the northern wetlands in exchange for 120 new wells at two nearby plots totaling 12 acres. This would increase oil production from 300 to 24,000 barrels daily and produce 70,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.
At the time, there was talk of a China-based equity fund financing the restoration effort.
One of the two plots — seven acres known locally as the Pumpkin Patch — was owned by Lyon Communities. The other was a site owned by the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority.
Years passed. Synergy partnered with Lyon Communities to form Beach Oil Minerals. In 2018, Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals and the LCWA agreed on a land swap: Synergy’s original, northern site — 150 acres — in exchange for the LCWA’s five-acre plot.
Puvunga Wetlands Protectors and its director, Anna Christensen, sued the California Coastal Commission over its approval of the land swap but lost. Last year, the deal was finalized, with some tweaks. (Most importantly: No new wells on the LCWA plot, just on the Pumpkin Patch.)Meanwhile, Synergy haspartnered with global insurer Munich Re to fund the restoration of a portion of the 150-acre site that it deeded to the LCWA. The restoration effort is restricted to Steamshovel Slough (about 45 acres) and approximately 30 acres adjacent to it.
The LCWA’s restoration efforts, then, have hinged on agreements with oil companies from the outset. To the project’s opponents, the net increase in oil production onsite calls for alarm, not celebration.
Dr. Charles Lester, who served as executive director of the Coastal Commission until 2016, was worried too. “We need to think about … not putting ourselves in the position to have to make those tradeoffs when the planet is in such a dire situation in terms of CO2 and petroleum development,” he said in 2020.
Risks to the surrounding community
Beach Oil Minerals plans to use techniques such as “directional drilling,” a method allowing horizontal drilling paths that could extend for miles under the wetlands.
In addition to Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals’ activity on the Pumpkin Patch, Hellman Properties still operates a 45-acre oil field in the wetlands’ southern half, next to the LCWA site greenlit for restoration.
Eric Zahn, the principal restoration ecologist at Tidal Influence — a consulting firm that played a key role in designing the areas to be restored — says that having oil extraction continue next door is “not ideal.” But just like having PCH nearby, he sees it as part of the confines that it’s his job to work around.
To Zahn’s knowledge, the LCWA trying to buy out the oil companies is “not [on the table] at this stage.” A more realistic scenario, he says, might be a similar arrangement to the one reached at Banning Ranch in Newport Beach, where the “mineral rights” are owned by one party and the “surface rights” by another.
But to the project’s opponents, such deals are just too risky. Advocates have pointed to the Newport–Inglewood fault line that runs through the wetlands.
And there’s also the direct impact on the surrounding community. Studies have found people living near oil wells are at greater risk of cancer, asthma, respiratory disease, and premature birth.
This is especially relevant since several high-density residential developments are planned directly adjacent to the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Three apartment buildings on Pacific Coast Highway, totaling more than 1,200 units, have cleared the Long Beach Planning Commission.
California’s Senate Bill 1137, signed into law last year, bans new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes and schools. But it doesn’t prevent developers from building new homes near existing wells.
A sacred Indigenous site
In addition to their ecological role, the Los Cerritos Wetlands also have profound importance to the Gabrielino/Tongva and Acjachemen nations indigenous to present-day LA and Orange County.
The wetlands lie within the village sites of Motuucheyngna and Puvungna, with a history going back more than 10,000 years. Puvungna is central to the creation story, held sacred as the place where a deity called Chinigchinich emerged and told the people how to live.
The LCWA worked with tribal groups to understand the location’s significance, which it plans to feature prominently in onsite signage, according to Zahn. But some — such as the Gabrieleno/Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians — vocally oppose the planned earthwork due to the likelihood of disturbing human burials.
It wouldn’t be the first time this happened. In 2001, Hellman Properties began work on a gated community named Heron Pointe on the eastern end of the wetlands, farther east of its current oil field. The Coastal Commission ended up issuing a cease-and-desist order when contractor John Laing continued grading work after human remains had been found.
Like the project’s other critics, Native advocates also worry about the risk of oil spills contaminating groundwater — crucial in Long Beach, which gets 60 percent of its water supply from wells.
“This is our Standing Rock,” Acjachemen elder Rebecca Robles wrote in a 2020 letter to the Coastal Conservancy, referring to the 2016 anti-oil-pipeline movement on Dakota and Lakota land.
Ann Cantrell, co-chair of the Sierra Club Los Cerritos Wetlands Task Force, is concerned that, with the constant arrival of new technologies to optimize oil extraction, there’s no telling when the companies will decide to abandon operations.
She feels that local and state authorities are being unassertive.
“From the beginning, nobody ever said, ‘Well, can we use some muscle to end oil drilling on the wetlands?’”
She also considers the planned restoration too drastic. According to Zahn, the grading work is necessary for the legally mandated buffers around the oil fields and to create a sloped landscape that can adapt to sea-level rise.
Zahn says that giving the tide greater access to the wetlands will improve biodiversity. Cantrell and her co-chair, Anna Christensen, are worried about the earthwork and increased flooding displacing existing animal and plant life.
“This idea of ‘erase and replace’… This is how we do redevelopment with people, too,” Christensen said. “We erased the low-income people of color from downtown, and now we’re building giant apartment houses for people who can spend $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom.”
The restoration of the southern area will begin this fall and wrap up in 2027. In the meantime, people interested in seeing the wetlands for themselves can join a guided walk with the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust or El Dorado Audubon, or explore the trails at the previously restored 10-acre Zedler Marsh on Fridays and Saturdays from 9 am to 2 pm.