Venoco’s case posture is a second Chapter 11 filing built around liquidity exhaustion, regulatory and operating constraints on its California oil-and-gas assets, and unresolved surety and abandonment-cost exposure, with no plan, sale, or postpetition financing path supplied in the current context pack. The debtor filed its voluntary petition on April 17, 2017, in Delaware, less than a year after a prior restructuring that had eliminated more than $1 billion of funded debt, but left the reorganized company exposed to asset retirement obligations, stranded production, and declining cash flow through the Chapter 11 Voluntary PetitionDkt. 1.
The filing was precipitated by a convergence of operating and liquidity pressure described in the Fernandes First Day DeclarationDkt. 12: Plains All American Pipeline line 901 remained offline and was expected to stay unavailable for four to seven years, effectively halting South Ellwood Field production; the California State Lands Commission declined a lease line adjustment; the Beverly Hills Unified School District terminated Venoco’s onshore facility lease effective December 31, 2016; and Aspen American Insurance demanded about $35 million of additional collateral on April 13, 2017 to support existing surety bonds. Venoco entered the case with approximately $25 million of cash, projected a cash shortfall by the fourth quarter of 2017, and faced estimated asset retirement obligations of about $109 million against roughly $50 million of surety bond coverage, while Platform Holly alone required about $1 million per month to maintain.
The restructuring record in the context pack is therefore a first-day, liquidity-preservation posture rather than a disclosed plan process: the debtor’s capital structure shown here consists of a $1.5 million unsecured prepetition demand promissory note held by Apollo Capital Management and MAST Capital Management, while the broader case pressure is operational, environmental, and surety-driven rather than a conventional funded-debt deleveraging. The only additional cited litigation event is the City of Beverly Hills and Beverly Hills Unified School District adversary complaint seeking injunctive and equitable relief against Venoco, filed about a month after the petition, which underscores that the case also involved local-property and facility-use disputes tied to the debtor’s California operations through the Beverly Hills Adversary ComplaintDkt. 1.
