Elk Hills Oil Field Totally Explained

Everything about The Elk Hills Oil Field totally explained

The Elk Hills Oil Field (formerly the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 1, or NPR-1) is a large oil field in northwestern Kern County, in the Elk Hills of the San Joaquin Valley, California in the United States, about twenty miles (32 km) west of Bakersfield. Discovered in 1911, and having a cumulative production of close to of oil at the end of 2006, it's the fifth-largest oil field in California, and the seventh-most productive field in the United States. Its estimated remaining reserves, as of the end of 2006, were around, and it had 2,387 active oil-producing wells. It is by an order of magnitude the largest natural gas-producing oil field in California, having produced over of gas since its discovery, and retaining over in reserve.
The principal operator on the field is Occidental of Elk Hills, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. Largely as a consequence of their operations at Elk Hills, Occidental is the third-largest petroleum producer in California.

Geology

The Elk Hills Oil Field has a complex stratigraphy compared to other nearby fields, many of which are a single large pool in a simple structural trap. Thirteen separate oil pools have been identified so far in the Elk Hills Field, in rock units ranging in age from Oligocene to Pleistocene. The shallowest formation, the Tulare, was the first in which oil was found, at below ground surface, and the deepest, the Oligocene portion of the Temblor containing the Agua Pool at a depth of, wasn't found until 1977.

Production and political history

Associated Oil Company discovered the field in June 1911, with the drilling of their "Well No. 1," to a depth of . The official "discovery" well, however, was drilled by the Standard Oil Company ("Hay No. 1") in January, 1919. By 1912 the field's capacity was considered to be significant enough that President William Howard Taft, concerned about the long-term availability of petroleum for the U.S. Navy, designated the region as the nation's first Naval Petroleum Reserve.
   The dusty Elk Hills have a prominent role in U.S. political history, for it was the lease of this land by Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, to Pan American Petroleum in 1922 in return for personal loans at no interest, that brought on the Teapot Dome scandal which ruined the reputation of the administration of Warren G. Harding, now commonly considered to be the most corrupt in U.S. history. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the lease, and returned the Elk Hills to the U.S. government.
   The oil field went largely untapped, held as a reserve, until the mid-1970s, when Congress passed the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act in response to the 1973-1974 Arab Oil Embargo. In 1976 the Carter Administration opened the lands for drilling and production again. Bechtel Petroleum Operations reached peak production in 1981, pumping 42 million barrels (6.7 million cubic meters) of oil out of the Stevens Pool in that year alone.
   A drive to privatize some government lands during the mid-1990s succeeded in 1997 with the sale of the reserve to Occidental Petroleum, the highest bidder. Occidental took over operations in early 1998 and has been the principal operator since then; in 2008 they'd a 78% interest in the oil field. Current reserves are claimed to be either 106,554,000 barrels of oil (according to the California Department of Conservation) or 484,000,000 barrels of oil equivalent (according to Occidental Petroleum).Further Information

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