Commentary by Edward Ring, Director of Water and Energy Policy at the California Policy Center
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Maven’s Notebook.
A new year has begun, and here in California, 2026 promises to deliver challenges that may at last transform the state’s energy and water policies. Let’s begin with a quick look at California’s current water policies in action.
The last month of 2025 delivered a series of storms that merited the distinction of being dubbed “atmospheric rivers.” How much of that abundant deluge was harvested, and how much was arguably squandered?
The best source for this information is through the California Data Exchange Center, a website maintained by the California Department of Water Resources. And what it shows illustrates just how committed the state agencies that manage California’s water supply are committed to scarcity. Three variables are all it takes to make this assessment; all of them concern the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The outflow of water from the delta into the ocean during December 2025 totaled just over 1.7 million acre feet. The amount pumped into the California Aqueduct totaled 184,974 acre feet, and the amount pumped into the Delta Mendota Canal totaled 126,845 acre feet.
This means that during a month that included an impressive deluge of harvestable runoff, of the 2,018,924 acre feet that flowed into the delta, 311,819 was harvested into our two major southbound aqueducts, and 1,707,105 flowed through to the ocean. That is, while torrential rain pummeled the entire state, causing high water and flooding from headwaters to estuaries, the powers that manage the delta pumps only managed to retain 15.4 percent of that water for farmers and urban users.
A day by day analysis reveals a story that is actually much worse. Of that 2.1 million acre feet of available water that flowed into the delta, 1,334,110 acre feet, or 66 percent of it, flowed during the final week of the month when the storm was at its height. But during those last seven days, only 6.5 percent of the available flow was pumped into the aqueducts, compared to 32.8 percent of the total flow during the 24 days of December prior to the final week. During a week when waters were running so high they literally threatened to breach delta levees, our state’s water managers only operated the pumps at 43 percent of their capacity. If they had used the pumps at the capacity they are designed to deliver, another 115,000 acre feet could have been pumped into the aqueducts.
To put this into perspective, California’s farm water agencies, with some help from state and federal funding, are investing $1.0 billion to expand the storage capacity of the San Luis Reservoir by 130,000 acre feet. In one week, a comparable amount of water could have been diverted for farm and urban use simply by leaving the delta pumps on during a big storm.
There are myriad justifications for this, of course. But they rely on biased studies and inflexible bureaucracy. For example, why can’t the governor simply declare that any farmer in the San Joaquin Valley who agrees to flood a portion of their land in order to percolate storm water delivered by the major aqueducts can receive that water without it affecting the allocation they will get later in the year to irrigate their crops? And later during the summer, why can’t they then be permitted to pump a quantity of water in excess of their permitted pumping, equal to a reasonable percentage, but not all, of the additional water they percolated during the winter?
Introducing flexibility of this kind into California’s water management policies would solve multiple challenges. It would help restore depleted aquifers, it would enable a sustainable increase in groundwater extraction, it would increase the overall water allocation to farmers – and cities, through underground water banking – without harming delta ecosystems, and it would cost nothing.
If creativity is called for with respect to California’s politics of water scarcity, a complete upheaval in the state’s energy policies may become unavoidable in 2026.
This is the year, after all, when not one, but two of California’s largest oil refineries will shut down. To see the impact this will have, the California Energy Commission (CEC) maintains an online report “California Oil Refinery Location and Capacities.” On this report it shows 13 major refineries with a combined capacity to process 1,622,171 barrels of crude oil per day. The CEC also reports “Annual Oil Supply Sources to California Refineries” totaling 1,399,038 barrels per day. This indicates that California’s refinery capacity has exceeded demand by nearly 16 percent. But not anymore.
With the closure of the Valero refinery in Benicia and the Philips 66 refinery in Los Angeles, the state’s remaining 11 refineries will altogether only have a capacity to process 1,338,171 barrels per day, which equates to a production deficit of 4.4 percent, and that is only when there are no disruptions whatsoever to refinery output. Typically a surplus capacity of at least five percent is needed to ensure a steady supply of gasoline and diesel fuel to consumers.
Will California’s oil industry successfully cope with this looming shortage via imports of refined gasoline that is formulated to the state’s unique requirements? Will the other threats to the state’s oil supply – deferred permitting for new wells, insufficient flow through vital pipelines that connect production fields to refineries, ongoing legislative attacks on oilfields everywhere in the state – also be successfully navigated? Or will the market regulate these supply challenges through punitive increases in the price of a gallon of gasoline, or, equally disruptive, through state imposed rationing?
To have a healthy economy, Californians need to withdraw not quite 40 million acre feet of water per year to adequately supply farms and cities, and they still rely on petroleum products for nearly 50 percent of all energy used in the state. Policies pursued by our state government for the last few decades have been in conflict with those imperatives, and 2026 could be the year of reckoning.
Politically contrived scarcity is not sustainable. It violates every goal that progressives along with conservatives tend to agree on, even if they disagree on the means to achieve them: sustainability, opportunity, resilience, affordability, and abundance. Until we have viable, competitive alternatives, we need to pump more water, and we need to pump more gasoline. To deny these facts is to deny reality.
EDWARD RING: Reversing California’s policies of scarcity
Commentary by Edward Ring, Director of Water and Energy Policy at the California Policy Center
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Maven’s Notebook.
The last month of 2025 delivered a series of storms that merited the distinction of being dubbed “atmospheric rivers.” How much of that abundant deluge was harvested, and how much was arguably squandered?
The best source for this information is through the California Data Exchange Center, a website maintained by the California Department of Water Resources. And what it shows illustrates just how committed the state agencies that manage California’s water supply are committed to scarcity. Three variables are all it takes to make this assessment; all of them concern the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The outflow of water from the delta into the ocean during December 2025 totaled just over 1.7 million acre feet. The amount pumped into the California Aqueduct totaled 184,974 acre feet, and the amount pumped into the Delta Mendota Canal totaled 126,845 acre feet.
This means that during a month that included an impressive deluge of harvestable runoff, of the 2,018,924 acre feet that flowed into the delta, 311,819 was harvested into our two major southbound aqueducts, and 1,707,105 flowed through to the ocean. That is, while torrential rain pummeled the entire state, causing high water and flooding from headwaters to estuaries, the powers that manage the delta pumps only managed to retain 15.4 percent of that water for farmers and urban users.
A day by day analysis reveals a story that is actually much worse. Of that 2.1 million acre feet of available water that flowed into the delta, 1,334,110 acre feet, or 66 percent of it, flowed during the final week of the month when the storm was at its height. But during those last seven days, only 6.5 percent of the available flow was pumped into the aqueducts, compared to 32.8 percent of the total flow during the 24 days of December prior to the final week. During a week when waters were running so high they literally threatened to breach delta levees, our state’s water managers only operated the pumps at 43 percent of their capacity. If they had used the pumps at the capacity they are designed to deliver, another 115,000 acre feet could have been pumped into the aqueducts.
To put this into perspective, California’s farm water agencies, with some help from state and federal funding, are investing $1.0 billion to expand the storage capacity of the San Luis Reservoir by 130,000 acre feet. In one week, a comparable amount of water could have been diverted for farm and urban use simply by leaving the delta pumps on during a big storm.
There are myriad justifications for this, of course. But they rely on biased studies and inflexible bureaucracy. For example, why can’t the governor simply declare that any farmer in the San Joaquin Valley who agrees to flood a portion of their land in order to percolate storm water delivered by the major aqueducts can receive that water without it affecting the allocation they will get later in the year to irrigate their crops? And later during the summer, why can’t they then be permitted to pump a quantity of water in excess of their permitted pumping, equal to a reasonable percentage, but not all, of the additional water they percolated during the winter?
Introducing flexibility of this kind into California’s water management policies would solve multiple challenges. It would help restore depleted aquifers, it would enable a sustainable increase in groundwater extraction, it would increase the overall water allocation to farmers – and cities, through underground water banking – without harming delta ecosystems, and it would cost nothing.
If creativity is called for with respect to California’s politics of water scarcity, a complete upheaval in the state’s energy policies may become unavoidable in 2026.
This is the year, after all, when not one, but two of California’s largest oil refineries will shut down. To see the impact this will have, the California Energy Commission (CEC) maintains an online report “California Oil Refinery Location and Capacities.” On this report it shows 13 major refineries with a combined capacity to process 1,622,171 barrels of crude oil per day. The CEC also reports “Annual Oil Supply Sources to California Refineries” totaling 1,399,038 barrels per day. This indicates that California’s refinery capacity has exceeded demand by nearly 16 percent. But not anymore.
With the closure of the Valero refinery in Benicia and the Philips 66 refinery in Los Angeles, the state’s remaining 11 refineries will altogether only have a capacity to process 1,338,171 barrels per day, which equates to a production deficit of 4.4 percent, and that is only when there are no disruptions whatsoever to refinery output. Typically a surplus capacity of at least five percent is needed to ensure a steady supply of gasoline and diesel fuel to consumers.
Will California’s oil industry successfully cope with this looming shortage via imports of refined gasoline that is formulated to the state’s unique requirements? Will the other threats to the state’s oil supply – deferred permitting for new wells, insufficient flow through vital pipelines that connect production fields to refineries, ongoing legislative attacks on oilfields everywhere in the state – also be successfully navigated? Or will the market regulate these supply challenges through punitive increases in the price of a gallon of gasoline, or, equally disruptive, through state imposed rationing?
To have a healthy economy, Californians need to withdraw not quite 40 million acre feet of water per year to adequately supply farms and cities, and they still rely on petroleum products for nearly 50 percent of all energy used in the state. Policies pursued by our state government for the last few decades have been in conflict with those imperatives, and 2026 could be the year of reckoning.
Politically contrived scarcity is not sustainable. It violates every goal that progressives along with conservatives tend to agree on, even if they disagree on the means to achieve them: sustainability, opportunity, resilience, affordability, and abundance. Until we have viable, competitive alternatives, we need to pump more water, and we need to pump more gasoline. To deny these facts is to deny reality.