Santa Maria Energy is going public and raising at least $40 million in new capital — and possibly much more – which could put the firm’s total funds raised at an estimated $90 million.
Santa Maria Energy’s contentious project to drill 136 new oil wells in North Santa Barbara County received approval from the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors last month. The Supervisors imposed strict limits on the project’s carbon emissions, essentially implementing a 10,000-ton-per-year cap and requiring the company to buy carbon credits if it goes over that limit.
Retail chain HomeGoods has signed a 10-year lease valued at $3.4 million at the Irish Hills Plaza in San Luis Obispo. It will replace OfficeMax in the 20,059-square-foot space.
The Bottlemeister’s schedule is so busy that CEO Tom Nulman can only take on a few new clients a year. But he tries to make room for small operations, giving them the same pricing as larger clients, even if the lower volumes means he’ll only break even on a day of bottling.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is rolling out a new Cybersecurity Center in collaboration with Northup Grumman and Raytheon with an eye toward training security experts for the defense industry and giving all of its engineering students a firmer grasp of how to make their creations secure against hackers.
An in-bottle wine aerator, a Spider-Man-like robot that can climb walls and a peach pit detector were among the projects on display at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s mechanical engineering expo on Nov. 21.
In remarks prepared for the 2014 SLO County Economic Forecast Breakfast on Nov. 22, Jordan Levine of Beacon Economics said only San Luis Obispo, San Jose, San Francisco and Bakersfield have gone positive when it comes to the pre-recession jobs peak.
Santa Barbara County’s decision to impose a strict cap on carbon emissions from a proposed oil project puts the county at a competitive disadvantage in California and likely will cut into the money energy firms pump into the regional economy.
The Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 on Nov. 12 to require Santa Maria Energy to cap its carbon emissions at 10,000 tons per year. Santa Maria Energy had proposed 136 wells for a site near Orcutt.
Santa Barbara County’s oil is thick and viscous. In order to extract it, companies inject steam into wells to soften the oil. Burning natural gas to create the steam is what generates the bulk of carbon emissions.