California Resources Corporation

California Resources Corporation's July 2020 bankruptcy collapsed Occidental Petroleum's spinoff of its California conventional oil assets. The 2014 spinoff loaded CRC with $6.2 billion in debt while the company faced California's increasingly hostile regulatory environment for oil production. Conventional oil operations can't compete with shale economics, and California's climate policies made expansion impossible. CRC emerged from bankruptcy in 2020 with reduced debt but still faces the structural challenge of being an oil company in America's most anti-oil state.