Long Beach Oil Field
Encyclopedia
The Long Beach Oil Field is a large oil field
underneath the cities of Long Beach
and Signal Hill
, California, in the United States. Discovered in 1921, the field was enormously productive in the 1920s, with hundreds of oil derricks covering Signal Hill and adjacent parts of Long Beach; largely due to the huge output of this field, the Los Angeles Basin produced one-fifth of the nation's oil supply during the early 1920s. In 1923 alone the field produced over 68 million barrels of oil, and in barrels produced by surface area, the field was the world's richest. The field is eighth-largest by cumulative production in California, and although now largely depleted, still officially retains around 5 million barrels of recoverable oil out of its original 950 million. 294 wells remained in operation as of the beginning of 2008, and in 2008 the field reported production of over 1.5 million barrels of oil. The field is currently run entirely by small independent oil companies, with the largest operator in 2009 being Signal Hill Petroleum, Inc.
(I-405) and the 710 (the Long Beach Freeway), and proceeds roughly paralleling the 405 freeway to near the intersection of Lakewood Boulevard and California State Route 1
(the Pacific Coast Highway) at their traffic circle in Long Beach. A small portion of the field, no longer productive, is in the city of Lakewood
, and another small isolated part of the field, the "Recreation Park Area", lies to the southeast of the main field. The total productive area of the entire field is 1725 acres (7 km²).
Unlike some of the oil fields in downtown Los Angeles, the adjacent Mid-City
area, and Beverly Hills
, which hide their oil wells inside soundproofed, windowless enclosures, attempting to be as invisible as possible, most of the wells in the Long Beach field use normal above-ground pumpjacks, sometimes behind walls or inside of fenced enclosures, but also scattered through the community in parking lots, in freeway cloverleaf medians, vacant lots, and other empty spaces. Typically, residential structures are not immediately adjacent to wells. Also differentiating this field from the completely urbanized oil fields nearer to downtown, most wells are drilled vertically rather than directionally from drilling enclosures.
Climate in the area is Mediterranean
, with cool rainy winters and mild summers, with the heat moderated by morning fog and low clouds. Drainage is by municipal storm drains into the Los Angeles River
to the west, and the San Gabriel River
to the east, both of which flow south into San Pedro Bay in the Pacific Ocean. As the area is largely urbanized, few areas of native vegetation and wildlife habitat remain.
, which includes the enormous Huntington Beach Oil Field
on the south, the Seal Beach Oil Field, the Long Beach field, and to the northwest of that the Dominguez, Rosecrans, and Inglewood fields.
The main portion of the Long Beach field is an anticlinal
structure paralleling the fault zone, with Signal Hill being its surface expression. Oil, which rises to the surface unless something is in the way, is trapped underneath impermeable units, in a series of oil bearing formations alternating with impermeable ones, like layers on a cake, but folded to form a long, narrow hill. The Long Beach field is notable for the thickness and depth of its oil-bearing formations; successively deeper wells continued to find oil even as late as the 1950s, with the deepest well finally hitting the basement rocks of the Catalina Schist
at 14950 feet (4,556.8 m) below ground surface.
Within the main area of the Long Beach field, seven separate pools have been defined, ranging in depth from around 2000 feet (609.6 m) to over 7500 feet (2,286 m). The thickness of the oil-bearing units was extraordinary, and largely accounted for the field's unusual standing as being the richest field by oil extracted per acre in the world, at least in the 1920s and 1930s. Primary productive geologic units in the field are the Pliocene
-age Repetto Formation and the Miocene
Puente Formation. Both of these porous units are richly oil-bearing elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin as well, anywhere that oil can collect due to a combination of stratigraphic and structural traps.
Oil from the Long Beach field tends to be medium- to heavy-grade, with API gravity
ranging from 14 to 30, and sulfur content relatively high at 2 to 3 percent by weight.
are a surface expression of the Salt Lake Oil Field
; crude oil seeps to the surface along a fault, biodegrading to asphalt. The native inhabitants of the region used the tar for many purposes, including as a sealant, and the first European settlers found similar uses. In the mid-19th century, oil had become a valuable commodity as an energy source, commencing a period of exploration and discovery for the sources of the substance. By the 1890s, prospectors were drilling for oil in the basin, and in 1893 the first large field – the Los Angeles City Oil Field
, adjacent and underneath the then-small city of Los Angeles – became the largest oil producer in the state. Oil companies began finding other rich fields not far away, such as the Beverly Hills
and Salt Lake fields. Attention shifted to Kern County
in the first two decades of the 20th century, as the super-giant fields there were discovered one at a time.
The Long Beach field was one of several significant oil discoveries in the Los Angeles basin and adjoining area in the 1920s, and by far the most productive. In 1920 drillers found the Huntington Beach field; in 1921 both the Santa Fe Springs field and the Long Beach field; and the others along the Newport-Inglewood Fault zone followed quickly after, with the Dominguez field in 1923, and the Inglewood and Rosecrans fields in 1924. When the discovery well was drilled, the Signal Hill area was already being developed with residences, as the hill offered a commanding view of the harbor area to the south. Initially, the Shell Oil geologists opposed drilling on the hill, as competitor Union Oil had tried and failed to find oil there just four years earlier, and they were unwilling to risk a repeat of the series of costly failures that had plagued them recently at the Ventura field
. Yet the discovery well, Alamitos No. 1 (now a historical landmark at the corner of East Hill Street and Temple Ave.) blew in as a tremendous gusher on June 25, 1921.
In the 1920s there were few regulations on well spacing, and Signal Hill sold narrow town lots which were quickly bought up by would-be oil millionaires, who put in wells that were virtually touching each other; in spite of this close spacing, most were profitable, although they drained the field quickly. Signal Hill became known as "Porcupine Hill" for its prickly appearance at a distance, covered with hundreds of wooden oil derricks (the low "nodding-donkey" pumpjack was yet to be invented). By 1923 the production from the field had become so abundant that oil from the Los Angeles Basin accounted for fully twenty percent of the entire world output. 1923 was the peak year for production from the field, and that also coincided with the peak for production from the entire Los Angeles basin; in spite of large discoveries in the 1930s, including the nearby Wilmington field
, fourth-largest in the nation, production never again attained that level. The price of oil had risen steeply, from $0.64/barrel in 1916 to $3.07 in 1920, largely because of the enormous increase in the number of automobiles on the roads – during that time the number of cars had tripled.
Production slowed during the Great Depression
, as the price of oil dropped with the demand, and the discovery of huge new fields not only in the Los Angeles Basin, but in Oklahoma and Texas, put a glut of petroleum on the market.
By 1950 the field was third in the United States in overall output, with a cumulative production of 750 million barrels of oil. Ahead of it were only the giant East Texas
and Midway-Sunset
fields. As production began to decline, and the technology became available, several waterflooding programs began, with the first in 1964 in the "Brown" horizon of the Repetto Formation. The goal was both to increase the flow of oil to production wells, and to replace the fluids pumped out of the reservoir in order to prevent subsidence, such as had occurred over the Wilmington field to the south.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Barto Enterprises, the ancestor of Signal Hill Petroleum, acquired many of the local assets of the large oil companies – ARCO
, Shell, Mobil, Texaco
, and others – that had previously been major operators on the Long Beach field (most of the majors moved out of the Los Angeles Basin
during that time, seeking easier opportunities elsewhere; most present-day operators are small to medium-sized independents). As of 2009, Signal Hill Petroleum operated more than 90% of the wells on the field, as well as several enhanced recovery
projects, including the waterflooding program.
Oil field
An oil field is a region with an abundance of oil wells extracting petroleum from below ground. Because the oil reservoirs typically extend over a large area, possibly several hundred kilometres across, full exploitation entails multiple wells scattered across the area...
underneath the cities of Long Beach
Long Beach, California
Long Beach is a city situated in Los Angeles County in Southern California, on the Pacific coast of the United States. The city is the 36th-largest city in the nation and the seventh-largest in California. As of 2010, its population was 462,257...
and Signal Hill
Signal Hill, California
Signal Hill is a small city in California located in the Greater Los Angeles area. Signal Hill, completely surrounded by the city of Long Beach, was incorporated on April 22, 1924, roughly three years after oil was discovered in Signal Hill. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...
, California, in the United States. Discovered in 1921, the field was enormously productive in the 1920s, with hundreds of oil derricks covering Signal Hill and adjacent parts of Long Beach; largely due to the huge output of this field, the Los Angeles Basin produced one-fifth of the nation's oil supply during the early 1920s. In 1923 alone the field produced over 68 million barrels of oil, and in barrels produced by surface area, the field was the world's richest. The field is eighth-largest by cumulative production in California, and although now largely depleted, still officially retains around 5 million barrels of recoverable oil out of its original 950 million. 294 wells remained in operation as of the beginning of 2008, and in 2008 the field reported production of over 1.5 million barrels of oil. The field is currently run entirely by small independent oil companies, with the largest operator in 2009 being Signal Hill Petroleum, Inc.
Setting
The Long Beach field is one of many in the Los Angeles Basin now largely overbuilt with dense urban development. Even with the dramatic land use changes over the decades since its discovery, it remains moderately productive, with oil wells and oilfield infrastructure intermixed with commercial and residential development. The field underlies the northern portion of the city of Long Beach and most of the city of Signal Hill. In spite of its name, most of the productive area of the field underlies the small city of Signal Hill, which has a population of around 11,000. The main productive area of the field runs from northwest to southeast, about five miles (8 km) long by one across, with the long axis following the Cherry Hill Fault Zone, which is part of the larger Newport-Inglewood Fault Zone, the most significant fault zone traversing the Los Angeles Basin. In the northwest, the oil field begins approximately near the junction of the San Diego FreewayInterstate 405 (California)
Interstate 405 is a major north–south Interstate Highway in Southern California. It is a bypass of Interstate 5, running along the western areas of the Greater Los Angeles Area from Irvine in the south to near San Fernando in the north...
(I-405) and the 710 (the Long Beach Freeway), and proceeds roughly paralleling the 405 freeway to near the intersection of Lakewood Boulevard and California State Route 1
California State Route 1
State Route 1 , more often called Highway 1, is a state highway that runs along much of the Pacific coast of the U.S. state of California. It is famous for running along some of the most beautiful coastlines in the world, leading to its designation as an All-American Road.Highway 1 does not run...
(the Pacific Coast Highway) at their traffic circle in Long Beach. A small portion of the field, no longer productive, is in the city of Lakewood
Lakewood, California
Lakewood is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The population was 80,048 at the 2010 census. It is bordered by Long Beach on the west and south, Bellflower on the north, Cerritos on the northeast, Cypress on the east, and Hawaiian Gardens on the southeast. Major thoroughfares...
, and another small isolated part of the field, the "Recreation Park Area", lies to the southeast of the main field. The total productive area of the entire field is 1725 acres (7 km²).
Unlike some of the oil fields in downtown Los Angeles, the adjacent Mid-City
Mid-City, Los Angeles, California
Mid-City is a district in Los Angeles, California. It is 2.5 miles south of Hollywood and 3.5 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The Lafayette Square, Victoria Park, Wellington Square, and Vineyard neighborhoods are part of the district.-Geography and history:Mid-City's boundaries are roughly...
area, and Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills Oil Field
The Beverly Hills Oil Field is a large and currently active oil field underneath part of the city of Beverly Hills, California, USA, and portions of the adjacent city of Los Angeles...
, which hide their oil wells inside soundproofed, windowless enclosures, attempting to be as invisible as possible, most of the wells in the Long Beach field use normal above-ground pumpjacks, sometimes behind walls or inside of fenced enclosures, but also scattered through the community in parking lots, in freeway cloverleaf medians, vacant lots, and other empty spaces. Typically, residential structures are not immediately adjacent to wells. Also differentiating this field from the completely urbanized oil fields nearer to downtown, most wells are drilled vertically rather than directionally from drilling enclosures.
Climate in the area is Mediterranean
Mediterranean climate
A Mediterranean climate is the climate typical of most of the lands in the Mediterranean Basin, and is a particular variety of subtropical climate...
, with cool rainy winters and mild summers, with the heat moderated by morning fog and low clouds. Drainage is by municipal storm drains into the Los Angeles River
Los Angeles River
The Los Angeles River is a river that starts in the San Fernando Valley, in the Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains, and flows through Los Angeles County, California, from Canoga Park in the western end of the San Fernando Valley, nearly southeast to its mouth in Long Beach...
to the west, and the San Gabriel River
San Gabriel River (California)
The San Gabriel River flows through southern Los Angeles County, California in the United States. Its main stem is about long, while its farthest tributaries extend almost altogether...
to the east, both of which flow south into San Pedro Bay in the Pacific Ocean. As the area is largely urbanized, few areas of native vegetation and wildlife habitat remain.
Geology
The Long Beach field is one of many prolific oil fields along the Newport-Inglewood Fault zoneNewport-Inglewood Fault
The Newport-Inglewood Fault is a right-lateral fault in Southern California. The fault extends for from Culver City southeast to Newport Beach at which point it runs out into the Pacific Ocean. The fault can be seen on the Earth's surface as line of hills extending from Signal Hill to Culver City...
, which includes the enormous Huntington Beach Oil Field
Huntington Beach Oil Field
The Huntington Beach Oil Field is part of rich pools of oil found along the West Coast of the United States in the early 1920s stretching from Huntington Beach, California to Santa Barbara, California....
on the south, the Seal Beach Oil Field, the Long Beach field, and to the northwest of that the Dominguez, Rosecrans, and Inglewood fields.
The main portion of the Long Beach field is an anticlinal
Anticline
In structural geology, an anticline is a fold that is convex up and has its oldest beds at its core. The term is not to be confused with antiform, which is a purely descriptive term for any fold that is convex up. Therefore if age relationships In structural geology, an anticline is a fold that is...
structure paralleling the fault zone, with Signal Hill being its surface expression. Oil, which rises to the surface unless something is in the way, is trapped underneath impermeable units, in a series of oil bearing formations alternating with impermeable ones, like layers on a cake, but folded to form a long, narrow hill. The Long Beach field is notable for the thickness and depth of its oil-bearing formations; successively deeper wells continued to find oil even as late as the 1950s, with the deepest well finally hitting the basement rocks of the Catalina Schist
Catalina Schist
The Catalina Schist is a metamorphic rock complex primarily exposed on Santa Catalina Island, California, that formed during the Cretaceous. The Catalina Schist is broadly correlated with the Franciscan Complex, a similar metamorphic complex formed along the California margin...
at 14950 feet (4,556.8 m) below ground surface.
Within the main area of the Long Beach field, seven separate pools have been defined, ranging in depth from around 2000 feet (609.6 m) to over 7500 feet (2,286 m). The thickness of the oil-bearing units was extraordinary, and largely accounted for the field's unusual standing as being the richest field by oil extracted per acre in the world, at least in the 1920s and 1930s. Primary productive geologic units in the field are the Pliocene
Pliocene
The Pliocene Epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 2.588 million years before present. It is the second and youngest epoch of the Neogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Pliocene follows the Miocene Epoch and is followed by the Pleistocene Epoch...
-age Repetto Formation and the Miocene
Miocene
The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...
Puente Formation. Both of these porous units are richly oil-bearing elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin as well, anywhere that oil can collect due to a combination of stratigraphic and structural traps.
Oil from the Long Beach field tends to be medium- to heavy-grade, with API gravity
API gravity
The American Petroleum Institute gravity, or API gravity, is a measure of how heavy or light a petroleum liquid is compared to water. If its API gravity is greater than 10, it is lighter and floats on water; if less than 10, it is heavier and sinks...
ranging from 14 to 30, and sulfur content relatively high at 2 to 3 percent by weight.
History, production, and operations
Oil was known in the Los Angeles basin since prehistoric times, as the La Brea Tar PitsLa Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits are a cluster of tar pits around which Hancock Park was formed, in the urban heart of Los Angeles. Asphaltum or tar has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. The tar is often covered with water...
are a surface expression of the Salt Lake Oil Field
Salt Lake Oil Field
The Salt Lake Oil Field is an oil field underneath the city of Los Angeles, California. Discovered in 1902, and developed quickly in the following years, the Salt Lake field was once the most productive in California; over 50 million barrels of oil have been extracted from it, mostly in the first...
; crude oil seeps to the surface along a fault, biodegrading to asphalt. The native inhabitants of the region used the tar for many purposes, including as a sealant, and the first European settlers found similar uses. In the mid-19th century, oil had become a valuable commodity as an energy source, commencing a period of exploration and discovery for the sources of the substance. By the 1890s, prospectors were drilling for oil in the basin, and in 1893 the first large field – the Los Angeles City Oil Field
Los Angeles City Oil Field
The Los Angeles City Oil Field is a large oil field north of Downtown Los Angeles. Long and narrow, it extends from immediately south of Dodger Stadium west to Vermont Avenue, encompassing an area of about four miles long by a quarter mile across...
, adjacent and underneath the then-small city of Los Angeles – became the largest oil producer in the state. Oil companies began finding other rich fields not far away, such as the Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills Oil Field
The Beverly Hills Oil Field is a large and currently active oil field underneath part of the city of Beverly Hills, California, USA, and portions of the adjacent city of Los Angeles...
and Salt Lake fields. Attention shifted to Kern County
Kern County, California
Spreading across the southern end of the California Central Valley, Kern County is the fifth-largest county by population in California. Its economy is heavily linked to agriculture and to petroleum extraction, and there is a strong aviation and space presence. Politically, it has generally...
in the first two decades of the 20th century, as the super-giant fields there were discovered one at a time.
The Long Beach field was one of several significant oil discoveries in the Los Angeles basin and adjoining area in the 1920s, and by far the most productive. In 1920 drillers found the Huntington Beach field; in 1921 both the Santa Fe Springs field and the Long Beach field; and the others along the Newport-Inglewood Fault zone followed quickly after, with the Dominguez field in 1923, and the Inglewood and Rosecrans fields in 1924. When the discovery well was drilled, the Signal Hill area was already being developed with residences, as the hill offered a commanding view of the harbor area to the south. Initially, the Shell Oil geologists opposed drilling on the hill, as competitor Union Oil had tried and failed to find oil there just four years earlier, and they were unwilling to risk a repeat of the series of costly failures that had plagued them recently at the Ventura field
Ventura Oil Field
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 long by two across,...
. Yet the discovery well, Alamitos No. 1 (now a historical landmark at the corner of East Hill Street and Temple Ave.) blew in as a tremendous gusher on June 25, 1921.
In the 1920s there were few regulations on well spacing, and Signal Hill sold narrow town lots which were quickly bought up by would-be oil millionaires, who put in wells that were virtually touching each other; in spite of this close spacing, most were profitable, although they drained the field quickly. Signal Hill became known as "Porcupine Hill" for its prickly appearance at a distance, covered with hundreds of wooden oil derricks (the low "nodding-donkey" pumpjack was yet to be invented). By 1923 the production from the field had become so abundant that oil from the Los Angeles Basin accounted for fully twenty percent of the entire world output. 1923 was the peak year for production from the field, and that also coincided with the peak for production from the entire Los Angeles basin; in spite of large discoveries in the 1930s, including the nearby Wilmington field
Wilmington Oil Field
The Wilmington Oil Field is a large petroleum field in Los Angeles County in southern California in the United States in terms of cumulative oil produced. Discovered in 1932, it is the third largest oil field in the United States...
, fourth-largest in the nation, production never again attained that level. The price of oil had risen steeply, from $0.64/barrel in 1916 to $3.07 in 1920, largely because of the enormous increase in the number of automobiles on the roads – during that time the number of cars had tripled.
Production slowed during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, as the price of oil dropped with the demand, and the discovery of huge new fields not only in the Los Angeles Basin, but in Oklahoma and Texas, put a glut of petroleum on the market.
By 1950 the field was third in the United States in overall output, with a cumulative production of 750 million barrels of oil. Ahead of it were only the giant East Texas
East Texas oil field
The East Texas Oil Field is a large oil and gas field in east Texas. Covering and parts of five counties, and having 30,340 historic and active oil wells, it is the largest oil field in the United States outside of Alaska, both in extent and in total volume of oil recovered since its discovery in...
and Midway-Sunset
Midway-Sunset Oil Field
The Midway-Sunset Oil Field is a large oil field in Kern County, San Joaquin Valley, California in the United States. Discovered in 1894, and having a cumulative production of close to of oil at the end of 2006, it is the largest oil field in California and the third largest in the United States....
fields. As production began to decline, and the technology became available, several waterflooding programs began, with the first in 1964 in the "Brown" horizon of the Repetto Formation. The goal was both to increase the flow of oil to production wells, and to replace the fluids pumped out of the reservoir in order to prevent subsidence, such as had occurred over the Wilmington field to the south.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Barto Enterprises, the ancestor of Signal Hill Petroleum, acquired many of the local assets of the large oil companies – ARCO
ARCO
Atlantic Richfield Company is an oil company with operations in the United States as well as in Indonesia, the North Sea, and the South China Sea. It has more than 1,300 gas stations in the western part of the United States. ARCO was originally formed by the merger of East Coast-based Atlantic...
, Shell, Mobil, Texaco
Texaco
Texaco is the name of an American oil retail brand. Its flagship product is its fuel "Texaco with Techron". It also owns the Havoline motor oil brand....
, and others – that had previously been major operators on the Long Beach field (most of the majors moved out of the Los Angeles Basin
Los Angeles Basin
The Los Angeles Basin is the coastal sediment-filled plain located between the Peninsular and Transverse ranges in southern California in the United States containing the central part of the city of Los Angeles as well as its southern and southeastern suburbs...
during that time, seeking easier opportunities elsewhere; most present-day operators are small to medium-sized independents). As of 2009, Signal Hill Petroleum operated more than 90% of the wells on the field, as well as several enhanced recovery
Enhanced oil recovery
Enhanced Oil Recovery is a generic term for techniques for increasing the amount of crude oil that can be extracted from an oil field...
projects, including the waterflooding program.