The history of the petroleum industry in the United States goes back to the early 19th century, although the indigenous peoples, like many ancient societies, have used petroleum seeps since prehistoric times; where found, these seeps signaled the growth of the industry from the earliest discoveries to the more recent.
Ovintiv Inc. is an American independent petroleum company. The company was formed in 2020 through a restructuring of its Canadian predecessor, Encana. Ovintiv is incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Chesapeake Energy Corporation is an American exploration and production company, headquartered in Oklahoma City.
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 Monterey Formation is an extensive Miocene oil-rich geological sedimentary formation in California, with outcrops of the formation in parts of the California Coast Ranges, Peninsular Ranges, and on some of California's off-shore islands. The type locality is near the city of Monterey, California. The Monterey Formation is the major source-rock for 37 to 38 billion barrels of oil in conventional traps such as sandstones. This is most of California's known oil resources. The Monterey has been extensively investigated and mapped for petroleum potential, and is of major importance for understanding the complex geological history of California. Its rocks are mostly highly siliceous strata that vary greatly in composition, stratigraphy, and tectono-stratigraphic history.
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.
Greka Energy, legally HVI Cat Canyon Inc., is a privately held company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration principally in Santa Barbara County, California. Formed in 1999 after the acquisition and merger of several smaller firms, it is a subsidiary of Greka Integrated, Inc., a holding company headquartered in Santa Maria, California, and is wholly owned by Randeep Grewal.
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 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 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 West Montalvo Oil Field is a large and productive oil field on the coast of Ventura County, California, in the United States, in and adjacent to the city of Oxnard, California. Discovered in 1947, it has produced approximately 43.7 million barrels (6,950,000 m3) of oil, and retains about 2.2 million barrels recoverable with current technology, in both the onshore and offshore areas. The offshore portion of the field is exploited from wells directionally drilled from onshore near McGrath Lake, from within an enclosure above the high-tide line at McGrath State Beach.
The inclusion of unconventional shale gas with conventional gas reserves has caused a sharp increase in estimated recoverable natural gas in Canada. Until the 1990s success of hydraulic fracturing in the Barnett Shales of north Texas, shale gas was classed as "unconventional reserves" and was considered too expensive to recover. There are a number of prospective shale gas deposits in various stages of exploration and exploitation across the country, from British Columbia to Nova Scotia.
The Rincon Formation is a sedimentary geologic unit of Lower Miocene age, abundant in the coastal portions of southern Santa Barbara County, California eastward into Ventura County. Consisting of massive to poorly bedded shale, mudstone, and siltstone, it weathers readily to a rounded hilly topography with clayey, loamy soils in which landslides and slumps are frequent. It is recognizable on the south slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains as the band at the base of the mountains which supports grasses rather than chaparral. Outcrops of the unit are infrequent, with the best exposures on the coastal bluffs near Naples, in the San Marcos Foothills, at the Tajiguas Landfill, and in road cuts. The geologic unit is notorious as a source of radon gas related to its high uranium content, released by radioactive decay.
The Cozy Dell Shale is a geologic formation of middle Eocene age that crops out in the Santa Ynez Mountains and Topatopa Mountains of California, extending from north of Fillmore in Ventura County westward to near Point Arguello, north of Santa Barbara. Because the Cozy Dell easily weathers to a clay-rich soil, it crops out infrequently and generally forms dense stands of chaparral in saddles between peaks and ridges of the more resistant Matilija and Coldwater formations.
The Matilija Sandstone is a sedimentary geologic unit of Eocene epoch in the Paleogene Period, found in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties in Southern California.
The Zaca Oil Field is an oil field in central Santa Barbara County, California, about 20 miles southeast of Santa Maria. One of several oil fields in the county which produce heavy oil from the Monterey Formation, the field is hidden within a region of rolling hills, north of the Santa Ynez Valley. As of 2011, the principal operator of the oil field is Greka Energy and the operator of the "Zaca Field Extension Project" is Underground Energy. The field is known to contain heavy crude oil and Underground Energy has recently discovered a lower sub-thrust block in the field, which was not previously produced by the field's historical operators. The field was discovered in 1942, reached peak production in 1954, and remains active with more than thirty oil wells and continues to grow.
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.
The California oil and gas industry has been a major industry for over a century. Oil production was a minor factor in the 19th century, with kerosene replacing whale oil and lubricants becoming essential to the machine age. Oil became a major California industry in the 20th century with the discovery on new fields around Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley, and the dramatic increase in demand for gasoline to fuel automobiles and trucks. In 1900 California pumped 4 million barrels (640,000 m3), nearly 5% of the national supply. Then came a series of major discoveries, and the state pumped 100 million bbl (16 million m3) in 1914, or 38% of the national supply. In 2012 California produced 197 million bbl (31 million m3) of crude oil, out of the total 2,375 million bbl (378 million m3) of oil produced in the U.S, representing 8.3% of national production. California drilling operations and oil production are concentrated primarily in Kern County, San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles basin.
Whiting Petroleum Corporation was a company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration primarily in the Bakken Formation and Three Forks Shale. It was organized in Delaware with its operational headquarters in Denver, Colorado.
The Refugio oil spill on May 19, 2015, contaminated one of the most biologically diverse areas of the West Coast of the United States with 142,800 U.S. gallons of crude oil. The corroded pipeline that caused the spill closed indefinitely, resulting in financial impacts to the county estimated as high as $74 million as it and a related pipeline remained out of service for three years. The cost of the cleanup was estimated by the company to be $96 million with overall expenses including expected legal claims and potential settlements to be around $257 million.
$328 million (2015)
$62 million (2015)