The Kettleman North Dome Oil Field is a large oil and gas field in Kings and Fresno counties, California. Discovered in 1928, it is the fifteenth largest field in the state by total ultimate oil recovery, and of the top twenty oil fields, it is the closest to exhaustion, with less than one-half of one percent of its original oil remaining in place. [1]
The Kettleman North Dome occupies the northernmost portion of the Kettleman Hills, a northwest-southeast trending line of hills about 30 miles (48 km) long which parallels the San Andreas Fault to the west. The range consists of two elongate "domes", the North Dome and Middle Dome; a portion of the Middle Dome is sometimes called the "South Dome," although the North and Middle Dome are the most topographically distinct. Both the North and Middle Domes overlie oil fields. [2]
The Kettleman Hills is named, and misspelled, after Dave Kettelman, a pioneer sheep and cattle rancher who grazed his animals there in the 1860s. [3] The hills, which rise to an elevation of approximately 1,200 feet (370 m), divide the San Joaquin Valley on the east from the much smaller Kettleman Plain to the west. They are discontinuous, as indicated by their name ("hills" rather than "ridge"). The predominant vegetation is grassland, with surrounding areas containing grassland, low scrub, orchards, and agricultural fields. The climate is arid, with 6 to 12 inches (300 mm) of precipitation per year on the average, all falling as rain. Summers are hot, with daily highs regularly exceeding 100 °F (38 °C) in the summer months, and winters are cool with occasional freezes. [4]
Interstate 5 parallels the range of hills to the northeast, and SR 33 to the southwest. SR 41, which runs from Paso Robles to Kettleman City to Fresno, crosses the hills at the southern extremity of the North Dome, and SR 269, which connects the town of Avenal to Interstate 5, crosses the hills in the middle of the North Dome.
North Dome itself is one of the longest of the California oil fields; only Midway-Sunset is longer. Its long axis, northwest to southeast, is approximately 14 miles (23 km), and it is almost three miles (5 km) across at its widest point. [5]
The oil field is one of a long line of similar lengthy, narrow, anticlinal fields paralleling the San Andreas Fault, where tectonic forces squeezed the rock formations into anticlinal structures, trapping large quantities of petroleum. To the northwest is the large Coalinga Oil Field; to the southeast are the Lost Hills Oil Field, Cymric, McKittrick, North Belridge, South Belridge, Elk Hills, Buena Vista, and finally the largest of all, the enormous Midway-Sunset field in the southwestern corner of the San Joaquin Valley. The total productive area of the Kettleman Hills North Dome is 13,700 acres (55 km2). [5]
Within the Kettleman Hills, oil is found in the large structural trap formed by the anticline. The large McLure Formation, of upper Miocene age, forms the impermeable cap beneath which enormous quantities of oil have pooled over millions of years, principally in the Temblor Formation, which is of Middle and Lower Miocene age. Within that formation, five different zones are identified in cross section, with a total thickness of petroleum-bearing rock approaching 2,000 feet (610 m). Underneath the Temblor is yet another series of impermeable and permeable strata, like layers of a cake: the Vaqueros Sandstone and Kreyenhagen Formation are impermeable units beneath the Temblor; underneath them, another large pool of oil is found in the Upper McAdams Formation (of Eocene age) at a depth of around 10,000 feet (3,000 m). This formation was not discovered until 1940. A few other smaller oil pools were found later, such as one in the Kreyenhagen in 1957 and the Whepley, a small additional pool at great depth in the Temblor Formation, discovered in 1976. While the Kreyenhagen is normally an impermeable shale, where it is highly fractured it is a productive unit in its own right, since oil collects in the fractures. [5]
Removal of oil from the large Kettleman Hills fields, mainly the North Dome, has been suggested as a cause of the 1985 M6.1 earthquake, since the total deformation caused by the quake was exactly that necessary to compensate for the oil removed historically, i.e. by filling the vacated space. The same mechanism has been suggested for the 1983 Coalinga earthquake and the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake, both of which occurred near the centers of mature oil fields. [6]
The presence of a large oil field was long suspected in the Kettleman Hills region, since it is an anticlinal structure like so many of the nearby San Joaquin Valley oil fields; however, early test wells found nothing, since drilling methods then lacked the ability to reach the 7,000 feet (2,100 m) necessary to tap the reservoirs. Before 1910, drillers made nine separate unsuccessful attempts to reach oil.
A persistent attempt paid off in 1927, when the Milham Company drilled its Elliott No. 1 well: after 19 months of labor, in October 1928, at a depth of 7,108 feet (2,167 m), oil was found, and a terrific blowout ensued, which took three years to bring under control. Elliott No. 1 and other wells in the huge Temblor pool produced 3,670 barrels a day during that period; the initial measured pressure was 3,540 psi (24,400 kPa). [5] The town of Avenal, originally named Milham City after the oil company, quickly grew near the field, the latest in a series of oil boom towns in the California Central Valley. Other oil drillers active at Kettlemen include Fred M. Manning. [7]
Unrestricted production of oil at the Kettleman Hills fields, mainly North Dome, was controversial during the 1930s. Other states, such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, restricted production of oil through agreements with each other, in order to keep the price from falling too far; however, in California no such regulation existed. Overproduction from Kettleman, with its depressant effect on the price of oil, was a cause of considerable antagonism in the oil industry at the time. [8] Production from Kettleman peaked in 1936, with over 29 million barrels pumped during that year, making it one of the most productive fields in the United States. [5] In 2006, the latest year for which data was available, production was a mere 128,000 barrels, even with the modern technologies available. [1]
Unlike many of the other major California oil fields, enhanced recovery methods have been used minimally at Kettleman Hills. Water flooding was used in both the Temblor and Vaqueros pools, between 1965 and 1977, but many of the enhanced recovery methods used successfully at other oil fields – steam flooding, fire flooding, gas injection, and so forth, which were so successful at Kern River, San Ardo, Midway-Sunset and elsewhere – have proved impractical because of the oil's relatively light API gravity and its depth.
J.P. Oil Company, Inc., of Lafayette, Louisiana, took over operation of the entire Kettleman Hills North Dome Oil Field in 1997, but as of 2008 the oil field is run by Chevron Corporation.
Boom Town, a 1940 film about wildcatting in the early Oklahoma oil industry, starred Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. The film ends with the Gable and Tracy characters preparing to be the first oil men to drill on the Kettleman Dome.
Wildcatting: The Hills of Kettleman by Eloise Sterling Hirt, Theodore Kesler Sterling, et al., is a novel about the discovery of oil in Kettleman Hills. One of the characters, "Bernie Bernard," is probably based on oilman Bernard H. "Bernie" Scott, one of the three geologists who discovered the field.
Avenal is a city in Kings County, California, United States. Avenal is located 35 miles (56 km) southwest of Hanford, at an elevation of 807 ft (246 m). It is part of the Hanford–Corcoran Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Kings County. In area, it is the fourth-largest city in Kings County. The ZIP Code for this community is 93204, and telephone numbers use the sequence (559) 386-XXXX. The population was 15,505 in the 2010 census, which includes inmates at the Avenal State Prison, the first prison actively solicited by a community in the state of California. Many of the remaining residents largely either work at the prison or in the agriculture industry. The prison provides approximately 1,000 jobs to residents. The California Department of Finance estimated that Avenal's population was 13,496 on July 1, 2019. As of that date, Avenal State Prison held 4,165 inmates, which was about 32% of the total population of Avenal. Inmates are counted as city residents by both the United States census and the California Department of Finance.
The Temblor Range is a mountain range within the California Coast Ranges, at the southwestern extremity of the San Joaquin Valley in California in the United States. It runs in a northwest-southeasterly direction along the borders of Kern County and San Luis Obispo County. The name of the range is from Spanish temblor meaning "tremor", referring to earthquakes. The San Andreas Fault Zone runs parallel to the range at the base of its western slope, on the eastern side of the Carrizo Plain, while the Antelope Plain, location of the enormous Midway Sunset, South Belridge, and Cymric oil fields, lies to the northeast.
The Midway-Sunset Oil Field is a large oil field in Kern County, San Joaquin Valley, California in the United States. It is the largest known oilfield in California and the third largest in the United States.
The South Belridge Oil Field is a large oil field in northwestern Kern County, San Joaquin Valley, California, about forty miles west of Bakersfield. Discovered in 1911, and having a cumulative production of over 1,500 million barrels (240,000,000 m3) of oil at the end of 2008, it is the fourth-largest oil field in California, after the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, Kern River Oil Field, and Wilmington Oil Field, and is the sixth-most productive field in the United States. Its estimated remaining reserves, as of the end of 2008, were around 494 million barrels (78,500,000 m3), the second-largest in the state, and it had 6,253 active wells. The principal operator on the field was Aera Energy LLC, a joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil. Additionally, the field included the only onshore wells in California owned and operated by ExxonMobil.
The Elk Hills Oil Field is a large oil field in western Kern County, in the Elk Hills of the San Joaquin Valley, California in the United States, about 20 miles (32 km) west of Bakersfield. Discovered in 1911, and having a cumulative production of close to 1.3 billion barrels (210,000 dam3) of oil at the end of 2006, it is the fifth-largest oil field in California, and the seventh-most productive field in the United States.
The Coalinga Oil Field is a large oil field in western Fresno County, California, in the United States. It surrounds the town of Coalinga, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, to the west of Interstate 5, at the foot of the Diablo Range. Discovered in the late 19th century, it became active around 1890, and is now the eighth-largest oil field in California, with reserves totaling approximately 58 million barrels (9,200,000 m3), and over 1,600 active oil wells. The principal operators on the field, as of 2008, were Chevron Corp. and Aera Energy LLC.
The Buena Vista Oil Field, formerly the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 2 (NPR-2) is a large oil field in Kern County, San Joaquin Valley, California in the United States. Discovered in 1909, and having a cumulative production of approximately 667 million barrels (106,000,000 m3), it is the tenth-largest oil field in California. As of year end 2006 the field had a total reserve of only about one percent of its original oil, and having produced a mere 713,000 barrels (113,400 m3). Since, the field has gone through a revitalization. Crimson Resources initiated a waterflood in the Etchegoin Formation, saw good response and sold the asset to Occidental Petroleum. CRC continued the development of the waterflood, but also tested the viability of the Monterey Formation. The Monterey Formation at Buena Vista has proven to be a viable target and is currently being developed.
The Cymric Oil Field is a large oil field in Kern County, California, in the United States. While only the 14th-largest oil field in California in total size, in terms of total remaining reserves it ranks fifth, with the equivalent of over 119 million barrels (18,900,000 m3) still in the ground. Production at Cymric has been increasing faster than at any other California oil field.
The Lost Hills Oil Field is a large oil field in the Lost Hills Range, north of the town of Lost Hills in western Kern County, California, in the United States.
The 1983 Coalinga earthquake struck at 4:42 p.m. Monday, May 2 of that year, in Coalinga, California.
The McKittrick Oil Field is a large oil and gas field in western Kern County, California. The town of McKittrick overlies the northeastern portion of the oil field. Recognized as an oil field in the 19th century, but known by Native Americans for thousands of years due to its tar seeps, the field is ranked 19th in California by total ultimate oil recovery, and has had a cumulative production of over 303 million barrels (48,200,000 m3) of oil. The principal operators of the field as of 2008 were Chevron Corp. and Aera Energy LLC, but many independent oil exploration and production companies were also active on the field. The California Department of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) estimates approximately 20 million recoverable barrels of oil remain in the ground.
The North Belridge Oil Field is a large oil field along California State Route 33 in the northwestern portion of Kern County, California, about 45 miles west of Bakersfield. It is contiguous with the larger South Belridge Oil Field to the southeast, in a region of highly productive and mature fields. Discovered in 1912, it has had a cumulative production of 136,553,000 barrels (21,710,200 m3) of oil, and retains 27,443,000 barrels (4,363,100 m3) in reserve, as of the end of 2006, making it the 40th largest oil field in the state.
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 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 Orcutt Oil Field is a large oil field in the Solomon Hills south of Orcutt, in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Discovered in 1901 by William Warren Orcutt, it was the first giant field to be found in Santa Barbara County, and its development led to the boom town of Orcutt, now the major unincorporated southern suburb of Santa Maria. With a cumulative production in 2008 of 870,000 barrels (138,000 m3) of oil, it is the largest onshore producing field in Santa Barbara County.
The Semitropic Oil Field is an oil and gas field in northwestern Kern County in California in the United States, within the San Joaquin Valley. Formerly known as the Semitropic Gas Field, it was discovered by the Standard Oil Company of California in 1935, and first understood to be primarily a natural gas reservoir; however, in 1956 a much deeper oil-bearing zone was discovered. The field contains the deepest oil well ever drilled in California, at 18,876 feet (5,753 m). At the end of 2008 the field still had 56 active oil wells, most of which were owned by Occidental Petroleum, and the field had an estimated 343,000 barrels of oil still recoverable with current technology.
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 Rio Vista Gas Field is a large natural gas field in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta in northern California, adjacent to Rio Vista, California. Discovered in 1936, and in continuous operation since, it has produced over 3.6 trillion cubic feet (100 km3) of gas in its lifetime, and retains an estimated reserve of approximately 330 billion cubic feet (9.3×109 m3). In 2008 alone, the most recent year for which data was available, it produced 18 billion cubic feet (510,000,000 m3) of gas. Spanning portions of three counties and covering over 29,000 acres (120 km2), it is the largest natural gas field in California, and one of the fifteen largest in the United States.
Garza Creek, originally El Arroyo de las Garzas. Its source on the north slope of Zwang Peak of the Diablo Range, in Kings County.
The Anticline Ridge is a ridge, southeast of Joaquin Ridge, declining from its 3,629 foot / 1,106 meter high point, Black Mountain in the north at 36°18′16″N120°24′12″W, to the southeast into low hills bound on the southeast by Los Gatos Creek that divides it from the Guijarral Hills. It is located in the inner California Coast Ranges, in Fresno County, California, east of the town of Coalinga. Anticline Ridge and Guijarral Hills divides Pleasant Valley from the San Joaquin Valley to the east. California State routes 33 and 198, which join together for the stretch through and north of Coalinga, cut across the Coalinga field and cross Anticline Ridge.