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
Dodger Stadium is a baseball stadium in the Elysian Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It is the home stadium of Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers. Opened in 1962, it was constructed in less than three years at a cost of ...
west to
Vermont Avenue
Vermont Avenue is one of the longest running north–south streets in City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, California. With a length of , is the third longest of the north–south thoroughfares in the region. For most of its length betwe ...
, encompassing an area of about four miles (6 km) long by a quarter-mile across. Its former productive area amounts to .
Discovered in 1890, and made famous by
Edward Doheny
Edward Laurence Doheny (; August 10, 1856 – September 8, 1935) was an American oil tycoon who, in 1892, drilled the first successful oil well in the Los Angeles City Oil Field. His success set off a petroleum boom in Southern California, ...
's successful well in 1892, the field was once the top producing oil field in California, accounting for more than half of the state's oil in 1895. In its peak year of 1901, approximately 200 separate oil companies were active on the field, which is now entirely built over by dense residential and commercial development. As of 2011 only one oil well remains active – behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue one block east of
Alvarado Street in the
Westlake
Westlake may refer to:
Places
Australia
* Westlake, Canberra, a ghost town suburb of Canberra
* Westlake, Queensland, a suburb of Brisbane
New Zealand
* Westlake, New Zealand, a suburb of Auckland
** Westlake Girls High School
** Westlake Boys ...
neighborhood, producing about .
[ p. 94.] The fortunes made during development of the field led directly to the discovery and exploitation of other fields in the Los Angeles Basin.
[Crowder, R.E. ''Los Angeles City Oil Field: California Division of Oil and Gas, Summary of Operations''. 1961. Vol. 47 No. 1, p. 70] Of the 1,250 wells once drilled on the field, and the forest of derricks that once covered the low hills north of Los Angeles from
Elysian Park west, little above-ground trace remains.
Setting
The Los Angeles City field is one of many in the Los Angeles Basin. To the west are the still-productive
Salt Lake
A salt lake or saline lake is a landlocked body of water that has a concentration of salts (typically sodium chloride) and other dissolved minerals significantly higher than most lakes (often defined as at least three grams of salt per litre). ...
and
Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills is a city located in Los Angeles County, California. A notable and historic suburb of Greater Los Angeles, it is in a wealthy area immediately southwest of the Hollywood Hills, approximately northwest of downtown Los Angeles. ...
fields; to the south is the Los Angeles Downtown Oil Field. Ten miles east-southeast is the
Brea-Olinda field, the first to be worked in the region. Even larger fields are still productive in other parts of the basin, such as the giant
Wilmington field which stretches from
Carson
Carson may refer to:
People
*Carson (surname), people with the surname
*Carson (given name), people with the given name
Places
;In the United States
*Carson, California, a city
*Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois
*Carson, Iowa, a city
*Ca ...
to
Long Beach
Long Beach is a city in Los Angeles County, California. It is the 42nd-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 466,742 as of 2020. A charter city, Long Beach is the seventh-most populous city in California.
Incorporated ...
.
Terrain in the vicinity of the Los Angeles City field includes gently rolling hills cut by ravines draining south. Elevations range from around 250 to above sea level, with the highest elevations in Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. Urban development is dense in the part of Los Angeles containing the field's former productive area, with numerous apartment blocks mixed with commercial and light industrial structures. U.S. Highway 101, the
Hollywood Freeway
The Hollywood Freeway is one of the principal freeways of Los Angeles, California (the boundaries of which it does not leave) and one of the busiest in the United States. It is the principal route through the Cahuenga Pass, the primary shortcut ...
, parallels part of the field to the north, and
California State Route 110
110 may refer to:
* 110 (number), natural number
*AD 110, a year
*110 BC, a year
* 110 film, a cartridge-based film format used in still photography
*110 (MBTA bus), Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus route
*110 (song)
''Berlin lebt ...
, the historic
Arroyo Seco Parkway
The Arroyo Seco Parkway, also known as the Pasadena Freeway, is one of the oldest freeways built in the United States. It connects Los Angeles with Pasadena alongside the Arroyo Seco seasonal river. It is notable not only for being an early fr ...
– the first freeway in the United States – cuts directly through the eastern part of the field immediately south of Dodger Stadium. The neighborhoods that contain the field include, from west to east,
Koreatown
A Koreatown ( Korean: 코리아타운), also known as a Little Korea or Little Seoul, is a Korean-dominated ethnic enclave within a city or metropolitan area outside the Korean Peninsula.
History
Koreatowns as an East Asian ethnic enclave hav ...
,
Westlake
Westlake may refer to:
Places
Australia
* Westlake, Canberra, a ghost town suburb of Canberra
* Westlake, Queensland, a suburb of Brisbane
New Zealand
* Westlake, New Zealand, a suburb of Auckland
** Westlake Girls High School
** Westlake Boys ...
,
Echo Park
Echo Park is a neighborhood in the east- central region of Los Angeles, California. Located to the northwest of Downtown, it is bordered by Silver Lake to the west and Chinatown to the east. The culturally diverse neighborhood has become known ...
,
Chinatown, and
Elysian Park.
Some significant public facilities built directly on the area of former oilfield operations include Shriners Hospital for Children,
St. Vincent Medical Center,
Belmont High School, and the
Edward R. Roybal Learning Center
Edward R. Roybal Learning Center (formerly known as Belmont Learning Center, Vista Hermosa Learning Center, and Central Los Angeles High School 11), is a secondary school located in the Westlake area of Los Angeles, California. Built to alleviate ...
.
Geology
Oil in the Los Angeles City field is relatively close to the surface. Every productive deposit has been in a single geologic unit, the shallow
Miocene
The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recent" ...
-age
Puente Formation. Covering the Puente Formation throughout most of the area is a thin layer of
Pliocene
The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58[Pleistocene
The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the '' Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed ...](_blank)
-age alluvium and terrace deposits.
Structurally the field is a faulted
anticline
In structural geology, an anticline is a type of fold that is an arch-like shape and has its oldest beds at its core, whereas a syncline is the inverse of an anticline. A typical anticline is convex up in which the hinge or crest is the ...
which trends generally east to west, with oil accumulations trapped in sand units dipping south, ending to the north either at a fault – in the eastern part of the field – or at the surface as tar seeps, in the western area.
Mechanisms of entrapment include pinchouts and local changes of permeability – forms of stratigraphic traps – and structural traps such as oil-bearing units blockaded by unrelated, impermeable units put there by motion along
faults. Three separate producing horizons, or vertical zones, are present in the Puente Formation, and are given ordinal numbers: First, Second, and Third zones. In addition to these zones, small pockets of oil have been found throughout the upper part of the Puente. The average depth of the three zones from top to bottom is 900, 1,100, and 1,500 feet.
[DOGGR, 259] Although wells have been drilled to much greater depths – for example, Seaboard Oil Company of Delaware drilled over into the
Topanga Formation, of
Miocene
The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recent" ...
age – no commercial quantities of oil have been found at these great depths.
The field is split into three geographic zones, unrelated to the three vertical zones. The Western Area contains seeps that were known prehistorically; it is separated from the Central zone by a fault. The Central Area, the first to be exploited, extends from the fault to approximately the intersection of the Hollywood and Pasadena Freeways, and the Eastern Area extends northeast from that intersection.
Oil in the field is generally heavy, with API gravity averaging about 14, and ranging overall from 12 to 20.
An early assessment by Paul Prutzman (1913) rated the quality of the oil from the field as low, due to the high sulfur content and absence of light fractions suitable for refining. The main use for oil taken from the field during the first decades of the 20th century was fuel oil, and it was also sprayed onto the young city's dirt roads to settle the dust.
History, production, and operations
Early development
Tar seeps have been known in the area from prehistoric times, and the Native American population of the Los Angeles basin used the tar for waterproofing and other purposes. The Spanish settlers used it for their lamps, as a sealant for roofs, and as grease for wagon wheels.
[Crowder, 68]
The earliest known well on the field, called the "Dryden Well", was a relatively shallow hole hand-dug near the intersection of 3rd Street and Coronado Street in 1857. It produced some heavy oil, tar, and asphaltum during the next 30 years, but the amounts were not recorded. The growing town purchased the product from the well owner to oil the streets. Another early well, this one a failure, was dug to almost in 1865 near the intersection of Temple and Boylston, but the attempt was abandoned after encountering hydrogen sulfide gas from the oil deposits, which were not far below.
More persistent drilling in 1890 by several groups of prospectors, including Maltman and Ruhland, succeeded in establishing production of several barrels of oil a day, and the California Department of Conservation credits these drillers with discovering the field.
[Prutzman, 201] However, it was Edward Doheny and Cannon's well, begun on November 4, 1892, that brought the field instant fame. They had dug a well to , halting because of the accumulation of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas in the hole; however the oil seeps they encountered encouraged them to continue. Doheny brought in a sharpened eucalyptus log and used it as an improvised percussion hammer to deepen the well, and shortly afterwards they punctured an oil reservoir, and began producing about seven barrels a day.
While hardly a gusher, their first well at the corner of Colton and Patton Streets was in the middle of an area of hundreds of small town lots that had been sold in a land boom of 1887. Since there were no regulations in California on well spacing at this time, anyone with a lot, and the $1,000 to $1,500 to drill an oil well, could potentially become rich – especially if they could get their well into production before their neighbors drained the oil reservoir. Within a year of the Doheny well there were 121 wells on the field interspersed with homes and businesses, and the field's cumulative production had reached . Well crowding was extreme: the town lots were often only 50' by 150', and sometimes contained as many as four wells.
[Crowder, 69] By the end of 1895, the field was producing of oil a day, had produced in the preceding year, and accounted for sixty percent of the state's oil production. But it was still expanding: in 1896 a new well found oil east of the fault zone near Sisters Hospital which had previously been considered to be the eastern boundary of the field. By the end of 1897, 270 wells had been drilled into this new area. Cumulative production from the entire field at the end of that year had passed a million barrels, from 551 wells.
The "Oil Queen of California"; peak years
During the early development of the field, no single firm had a dominant share. Drillers started their own companies, flooding the local stock exchange with shares of start-up oil firms. There were so many of these that the
Los Angeles Stock Exchange had to open a separate facility just to deal with oil stocks.
By far the most successful entrepreneur on the field, however, was a piano teacher from Kentucky named
Emma Summers
Emma Summers (née McCutchen, 1858 – 1941) was an American Business magnate, oil tycoon in the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century.
Personal life and education
Emma McCutchen, whose father was a Bank, banker and local offici ...
, soon nicknamed the "Oil Queen of California." She purchased a half-interest in an oil well for $700 in the area of the present-day Civic Center, using the proceeds from her piano lessons, and then purchased some others on credit. As her wells became successful, she shrewdly acquired others, forcing other operators out of business, and selling her oil to various local power companies, hotels, and utilities, all while doing her own accounting and continuing to give piano lessons at night. When the price of oil peaked around $1.80 a barrel, she controlled about half of the wells on the central portion of the field.
In 1903 the boom briefly turned to bust as the price of oil dropped to only fifteen cents a barrel, due to abundant oil flooding the market from the Los Angeles field and others just opening up both in the Los Angeles basin and in the San Joaquin Valley.
The peak year for the field was 1901, during which 1,150 active wells pumped over . Over 200 separate companies were in operation on the field at this time. Of these, the largest were Union Consolidated Crude Oil Company, L.A. Terminal & Transport, and Westlake Oil Company.
Edward A. Clampitt
Edward A. Clampitt (December 14, 1868 – September 26, 1919) was a pioneer oilman in Los Angeles at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. He was also an elected a member of the Los Angeles City Council.
History
Clampitt was born in Macon Coun ...
, an eastern businessman who had come to Los Angeles to make a fortune in the oil industry, was also one of the principal operators in the first decade of the 20th century. Production declined quickly after the peak; there were simply too many wells draining a reservoir of limited capacity and pressure, and less and less oil was able to be profitably extracted. After 1915 only two new wells were drilled on the field.
The early years on the field were not without mishap. In 1907, one of the gigantic redwood oil tanks near Echo Lake ruptured, and crude oil flooded downhill into the lake, catching fire and burning on the water for three days.
The lake is now part of Echo Park, within the
neighborhood of the same name. Lawlessness was a problem during the boom period as well, with oil thieves draining tanks overnight, stealing tools, and sabotaging wells of competitors.
As the boom years of the field occurred before the formation of regulatory agencies in California, record keeping was sometimes sparse, not only for oil production but for the very existence and location of the wells. R.E. Crowder, writing in 1961, counted 142 wells which likely existed, but could not be located; some may have been dry holes. A more recent survey suggested that up to 300 wells may have been drilled within the vicinity of the oil field but abandoned without a trace.
By 1961 most of the oil field was dedicated to redevelopment as a residential area, under the auspices of the Los Angeles Urban Renewal Association. At this time, 93 wells still remained active in the field, run by 22 separate companies.
One by one the wells have been abandoned, with the one remaining well quietly pumping behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue.
Recent land use controversies
After an explosion which leveled a
Ross Dress for Less
Ross Stores, Inc., operating under the brand name Ross Dress for Less, is an American chain of discount department stores headquartered in Dublin, California. It is the largest off-price retailer in the U.S.; as of 2018, Ross operates 1,483 st ...
in the
Fairfax District in 1985, caused by an overnight accumulation of methane which had seeped up from the underlying
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 o ...
, construction over Los Angeles's old oil fields became much more controversial and difficult. The city defined "methane zones" around all oil fields within its limits, and then enacted ordinances to ensure that new and existing structures within these zones were sufficiently ventilated to prevent the accumulation of explosive levels of methane. Mitigation systems for modern buildings include subsurface barriers, ventilation systems, methane detectors, and alarms. Thousands of buildings in the Los Angeles area have such systems, including the
Staples Center
Crypto.com Arena is a multi-purpose indoor arena in Downtown Los Angeles. Adjacent to the L.A. Live development, it is located next to the Los Angeles Convention Center complex along Figueroa Street. The arena opened on October 17, 1999; it ...
and
Los Angeles Convention Center
The Los Angeles Convention Center is a convention center in the southwest section of downtown Los Angeles. It hosts multiple annual conventions and has often been used as a filming location in TV shows and movies.
History
The convention center ...
.
[Bonner, ''Los Angeles Times'', 1999]
Construction of the Belmont Learning Center, now known as the
Edward R. Roybal Learning Center
Edward R. Roybal Learning Center (formerly known as Belmont Learning Center, Vista Hermosa Learning Center, and Central Los Angeles High School 11), is a secondary school located in the Westlake area of Los Angeles, California. Built to alleviate ...
, "the nation's most expensive high school"
began in 1988 adjacent to, and partially above, the former oil field, and within a methane zone. Soil tests in the early 1990s showed methane at high levels, possibly migrating up from old wellbores (not all of which were mapped, let alone abandoned to modern standards). Construction of the complex continued intermittently, with partial demolition and reconstruction after additional contamination and an earthquake fault were found. The Learning Center eventually was completed at a cost of $377 million, not far from the area that was the field's center of operations 100 years before.
Notes
References
*
* ''California Oil and Gas Fields, Volumes I, II and III''. Vol. I (1998), Vol. II (1992), Vol. III (1982). California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR). 1,472 pp. Los Angeles City Oil Field information pp. 258–259. PDF file available on CD from www.consrv.ca.gov.
* California Department of Conservation, Oil and Gas Statistics, Annual Report, December 31, 2008.
*
*
* Soper, E.K. Los Angeles City Oil Field: Geologic Formations and Economic Development of California: State Division of Mines Bulletin 118, 1943. p 280. Available (with OCR scanning errors
here*
*
{{coord, 34.0659, -118.2677, type:landmark_source:enwiki-googlemaplink, display=title
Oil fields in California
Echo Park, Los Angeles
Elysian Park, Los Angeles
Environment of Los Angeles
Geography of Los Angeles
Geology of Los Angeles County, California
History of Los Angeles
Petroleum in California
Urban oil fields