Eugene Island block 330 oil field is an oil field in the United States Exclusive Economic Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It is located 170 miles (270 km) southwest of New Orleans, 70–85 miles (113–137 km) off the Louisiana coast comprising six and a half leased blocks: Eugene Island 313, 314 south, 330, 331, 332, 337 and 338.
Rincon Island is a small 2.3-acre artificial island located off Mussel Shoals in Ventura County, California on public land leased from the California State Lands Commission (CSLC). The island is situated approximately 3,000 feet (910 m) offshore in 55 feet (17 m) of water. The island was constructed in 1958 for the specific purpose of well drilling and oil and gas production. It is near the seaside communities of Mussel Shoals and La Conchita. The island is connected to the mainland by the Richfield Pier.
The Santa Barbara oil spill occurred in January and February 1969 in the Santa Barbara Channel, near the city of Santa Barbara in Southern California. It was the largest oil spill in United States waters at the time, and now ranks third after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills. It remains the largest oil spill to have occurred in the waters off California.
Ellwood Oil Field and South Ellwood Offshore Oil Field are a pair of adjacent, partially active oil fields adjoining the city of Goleta, California, about twelve miles (19 km) west of Santa Barbara, largely in the Santa Barbara Channel. A richly productive field in the 1930s, the Ellwood Oil Field was important to the economic development of the Santa Barbara area. A Japanese submarine shelled the area during World War II. It was the first direct naval bombardment of the continental U.S. since the Civil War, causing an invasion scare on the West Coast.
Offshore oil and gas in the United States provides a large portion of the nation’s oil and gas supply. Large oil and gas reservoirs are found under the sea offshore from Louisiana, Texas, California, and Alaska. Environmental concerns have prevented or restricted offshore drilling in some areas, and the issue has been hotly debated at the local and national levels.
Offshore oil and gas in California provides a significant portion of the state's petroleum production. Offshore oil and gas has been a contentious issue for decades, first over the question of state versus federal ownership, but since 1969 mostly over questions of resource development versus environmental protection.
The Vaqueros Formation is a sedimentary geologic unit primarily of Upper Oligocene and Lower Miocene age, which is widespread on the California coast and coastal ranges in approximately the southern half of the state. It is predominantly a medium-grained sandstone unit, deposited in a shallow marine environment. Because of its high porosity and nearness to petroleum source rocks, in many places it is an oil-bearing unit, wherever it has been configured into structural or stratigraphic traps by folding and faulting. Being resistant to erosion, it forms dramatic outcrops in the coastal mountains. Its color ranges from grayish-green to light gray when freshly broken, and it weathers to a light brown or buff color.
The Beverly Hills Oil Field is a large and currently active oil field underneath part of the US cities of Beverly Hills, California, and portions of the adjacent city of Los Angeles. Discovered in 1900, and with a cumulative production of over 150 million barrels of oil, it ranks 39th by size among California's oil fields, and is unusual for being a large, continuously productive field in an entirely urban setting. All drilling, pumping, and processing operations for the 97 currently active wells are done from within four large "drilling islands", visible on Pico and Olympic boulevards as large windowless buildings, from which wells slant diagonally into different parts of the producing formations, directly underneath the multimillion-dollar residences and commercial structures of one of the wealthiest cities in the United States. Annual production from the field was 1.09 million barrels in 2006, 966,000 barrels in 2007, and 874,000 in 2008, and the field retains approximately 11 million barrels of oil in reserve, as estimated by the California Department of Conservation. The largest operators as of 2009 were independent oil companies Plains Exploration & Production and BreitBurn Energy.
The Ventura Oil Field is a large and currently productive oil field in the hills immediately north of the city of Ventura in southern California in the United States. It is bisected by California State Route 33, the freeway connecting Ventura to Ojai, and is about eight miles (13 km) long by two across, with the long axis aligned east to west. Discovered in 1919, and with a cumulative production of just under a billion barrels of oil as of 2008, it is the tenth-largest producing oil field in California, retaining approximately 50 million barrels in reserve, and had 423 wells still producing. As of 2009 it was entirely operated by Aera Energy LLC.
The Summerland Oil Field is an inactive oil field in Santa Barbara County, California, about four miles (6 km) east of the city of Santa Barbara, within and next to the unincorporated community of Summerland. First developed in the 1890s, and richly productive in the early 20th century, the Summerland Oil Field was the location of the world's first offshore oil wells, drilled from piers in 1896. This field, which was the first significant field to be developed in Santa Barbara County, produced 3.18 million of barrels of oil during its 50-year lifespan, finally being abandoned in 1939-40. Another nearby oil field entirely offshore, discovered in 1957 and named the Summerland Offshore Oil Field, produced from two drilling platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel before being abandoned in 1996.
Offshore oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico is a major source of oil and natural gas in the United States. The western and central Gulf of Mexico, which includes offshore Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, is one of the major petroleum-producing areas of the United States. Oil production from US federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico reached an all-time annual high of 1.65 million barrels per day in 2017. Oil production is expected to continue the upward trend in 2018 and 2019, based on ten new oil fields which are planned to start production in those years. According to the Energy Information Administration, "Gulf of Mexico federal offshore oil production accounts for 15% of total U.S. crude oil production and federal offshore natural gas production in the Gulf accounts for 5% of total U.S. dry production."
The Rincon Oil Field is a large oil field on the coast of southern California, about 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the city of Ventura, and about 20 miles (32 km) east-southeast of the city of Santa Barbara. It is the westernmost onshore field in a series of three fields which follow the Ventura Anticline, an east-west trending feature paralleling the Transverse Ranges. Discovered in 1927, the oil field is ranked 36th in California by size of recoverable oil reserves, and while mostly depleted – now having, by California Department of Conservation estimates, only about 2.5% of its original oil – it remains productive, with 77 wells active at the beginning of 2008. Oil produced in the field flows through the M-143 pipeline, which parallels U.S. Highway 101 southeast to the Ventura Pump Station, at which point it joins a Tosco pipeline which carries it to Los Angeles area refineries. As of 2009, the primary operators of the field were Occidental Petroleum for the onshore portion, and Greka Energy for the offshore portion. The offshore part of the field is operated mainly from Rincon Island.
The Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field is a large oil and gas field underneath the Santa Barbara Channel about eight miles southeast of Santa Barbara, California. Discovered in 1968, and with a cumulative production of over 260 million barrels of oil, it is the 24th-largest oil field within California and the adjacent waters. As it is in the Pacific Ocean outside of the 3-mile tidelands limit, it is a federally leased field, regulated by the U.S. Department of the Interior rather than the California Department of Conservation. It is entirely produced from four drilling and production platforms in the channel, which as of 2009 were operated by Dos Cuadras Offshore Resources (DCOR), LLC, a private firm based in Ventura. A blowout near one of these platforms – Unocal's Platform A – was responsible for the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that was formative for the modern environmental movement, and spurred the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act.
The Lompoc Oil Field is a large oil field in the Purisima Hills north of Lompoc, California, in Santa Barbara County. Discovered in 1903, two years after the discovery of the Orcutt Oil Field in the Solomon Hills, it is one of the oldest oil fields in northern Santa Barbara County, and one of the closest to exhaustion, reporting only 1.7 million barrels (270,000 m3) of recoverable oil remaining out of its original 50 million barrels (7,900,000 m3) as of the end of 2008. Its sole operator is Sentinel Peak Resources, who acquired it from Freeport-McMoRan. In 2009, the proposed decommissioning and habitat restoration of the 3,700-acre (15 km2) field was part of a controversial and so-far unsuccessful deal between Plains, several environmental groups, Santa Barbara County, and the State of California, to allow Plains to carry out new offshore oil drilling on the Tranquillon Ridge, in the Pacific Ocean about twenty miles (32 km) southwest of the Lompoc field.
The San Miguelito Oil Field is a large and currently productive oil field in the hills northwest of the city of Ventura in southern California in the United States. The field is close to the coastline, with U.S. Highway 101 running past at the base of the hills and is sandwiched between the larger Ventura Oil Field to the east and the Rincon Oil Field, which is partially offshore, to the north and northwest. Discovered in 1931, and with about 7 million barrels of oil remaining out of its original 125 million, it ranks 44th in the state by size, and at the beginning of 2009 had 61 producing oil wells, all operated by Vintage Production California LLC, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum.
The Oxnard Oil Field is a large and productive oil field in and adjacent to the city of Oxnard, in Ventura County, California in the United States. Its conventional oil reserves are close to exhaustion, with only an estimated one percent of the original oil recoverable with current technology remaining: 434,000 barrels (69,000 m3) out of an original 43.5 million. However, the reservoir includes an enormous deposit of tar sands, ultra-heavy oil classed as an unconventional petroleum reserve, and potentially containing 400 million barrels (64,000,000 m3) of oil equivalent, should it become economically feasible to extract. Present operators on the field include Tri-Valley Oil & Gas Co., Anterra Energy Services, Inc., Chase Production Co., and Occidental Petroleum through its Vintage Production subsidiary. As of the beginning of 2009, there were 34 active wells on the field.
The South Mountain Oil Field is a large and productive oil field in Ventura County, California, in the United States, in and adjacent to the city of Santa Paula. Discovered in 1916, and having a cumulative production of over 158 million barrels (25,100,000 m3) of oil, it is the 37th largest oil field in California and the second largest in Ventura County. As of the beginning of 2009, it retains 316 active wells, and has an estimated 1.4 million barrels (220,000 m3) of oil remaining recoverable with current technology. Vintage Production, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, was the largest operator as of 2009.
The Guijarral Hills Oil Field is a formerly-productive oil and gas field near Coalinga on the western side of the Central Valley in central California in the United States. Discovered in 1948, and having produced 5.4 million barrels (860,000 m3) of oil during its peak year in 1950, it now has but one active oil well producing a little over a barrel of oil a day, and is very near to exhaustion, with only 343,000 recoverable barrels of oil remaining throughout its 2,515-acre (10.18 km2) extent according to the official California State Department of Conservation estimate. As of 2010, the only active operator was Longview Production Company.
The Mesa Oil Field is an abandoned oil field entirely within the city limits of Santa Barbara, California, in the United States. Discovered in 1929, it was quickly developed and quickly declined, as it proved to be but a relatively small accumulation of oil in a single geologic formation. While the field was active in the 1930s, residential development in most of the Mesa neighborhood of Santa Barbara came to a halt. The field included two major productive areas with a total surface extent of only 210 acres (0.85 km2), and produced 3,700,000 barrels (590,000 m3) of oil during its brief lifetime.
The Cat Canyon Oil Field is a large oil field in the Solomon Hills of central Santa Barbara County, California, about 10 miles southeast of Santa Maria. It is the largest oil field in Santa Barbara County, and as of 2010 is the 20th-largest in California by cumulative production.
