Los Angeles county was a major oil prucing region, from about 1920-1950, I wonder if the region has a lot of oil , which wasn’t accessible with the older drilling technology. is it possible that there is a huge amount of recoverable oil there/ of course, the area is now densly inhabited- can you drill wells there now, without disrupting people? I recall there were active wells in torrance and Redondo beach-so is the area about to experience a new oil boom?
I would imagine that the enviromental regulations would make this impossible.
There is likely a fair amount of undiscovered oil left in the LA basin. Since the 1960’s it has been almost impossible to gain drilling permits in LA: even Armand Hammer (whose company, Occidental Petroleum, was based in LA) couldn’t get the city to give him new permits back in the late 1960s. cite
There are still lots of active wells in the basin. Just drive through Baldwin Hills and you’ll see dozens of them. And there’s a very famous (and pretty) well right next to Beverly Hill High School.
Here a tour of Los Angeles oil fields that the Los Angeles Basin Geologic Society ran in early April. These are all existing operations, however.
You can use directional drilling to drill wells from far away, ~10 km. A bigger hurdle may be the cost of building new pipelines to transport what you get from the well. You have to acquire the land and you won’t be able to put buildings over top of it.
Whatever happened to the fake island that was a camoflauged oil rig?
There are still 3 such islands in Long Beach harbor, named Grissom, Chaffee, and White, in honor of the Apollo 1 astronauts.
The un-built-up area here http://maps.google.com/maps?layer=&ie=UTF8&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=92.239978,86.308594&hl=en&t=h&om=1&z=14&ll=33.69628,-118.038654&spn=0.053058,0.079823 just a few miles South in Huntington beach is still an active field.
Freeman is also one of the Long Beach “oil islands” - named after Theodore Freeman, another NASA astronaut (who died before making a space flight). He was killed in October 1964 when he had a bird strike while flying a T-38.
Minor interesting side note: The guy who discovered oil in the LA basin was author Larry Niven’s grandfather. Niven was born with a silver spoon in his mouth the size of a snow shovel!
The Los Angeles basin is littered with active oil drilling. There is no zoning whatsoever regarding oil rigs, and you will find them next to schools, shopping centers, housing tracts, etc.
Wow! That must have been one painful delivery for his mother.
There’s a petroleum spring in Placerita Canyon that bubbles up in the middle of a trail. Stinks like the dickens, but pretty cool to see. There’s pumping all around Santa Clarita.