The Orcutt Oil Field is a large

oil field A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface accumulation of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. Such reservoirs form when kerogen (ancient plant matter) is created in surrounding rock by the presence ...

in the Solomon Hills south of

Orcutt Orcutt is an unincorporated town and census-designated place located in the Santa Maria Valley in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Orcutt is named for William Warren Orcutt, the manager of the Geological, Land and Engineering Dep ...

, in

Santa Barbara County Santa Barbara County, California, officially the County of Santa Barbara, is located in Southern California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 448,229. The county seat is Santa Barbara, and the largest city is Santa Maria. Santa Barba ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. Discovered in 1901 by

William Warren Orcutt William Warren Orcutt (February 14, 1869 – 1942) was a petroleum geologist who is considered a pioneer in the development of oil production in California, and the use of geology in the oil industry. He is also known for his contributions to pa ...

, it was the first giant field (over in ultimate recovery) to be found in Santa Barbara County, and its development led to the boom town of Orcutt, now the major unincorporated southern suburb of Santa Maria. With a cumulative production in 2008 of of oil, it is the largest onshore producing field in Santa Barbara County. The Orcutt field was called the "Santa Maria Field" until the discovery of the larger Santa Maria Valley Oil Field on the plain to the north, an area which is now largely covered with the urban and suburban development. Several oil companies, including Breitburn Energy and Phoenix Energy, LLC are still actively producing from the Orcutt field. p. 94 The field, mostly located on the old Careaga family ranch, also contains the remains of the ghost town of Bicknell, a company town built for oil workers in the early years of the 20th century, but abandoned in the mid-1930s.North Hills Project: history of the Orcutt Hills
/ref>

Setting

The Orcutt field occupies a large portion of the Solomon Hills and Careaga canyon south of Orcutt, including most of the otherwise undeveloped land between

Highway 101 Highway 101 was an American country music band founded in 1986 in Los Angeles, California. The initial lineup consisted of Paulette Carlson (lead vocals), Jack Daniels (guitar), Curtis Stone (bass guitar, vocals), and Scott "Cactus" Moser (drums) ...

on the east and State Route 135 on the west. Its total productive area is , almost .California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR). ''California Oil and Gas Fields, Volumes I, II and III''. Vol. I (1998), Vol. II (1992), Vol. III (1982). PDF file available on CD from www.consrv.ca.gov. p. 367 Most of the active oilfield operations are invisible from the populated parts of the Santa Maria Valley, as the wells, tanks, and other facilities are behind the Graciosa Ridge, which rises to elevation at Mount Solomon, and the most active part of the field in 2009 was on the south slope of the range. There are no public roads entering the field. Terrain is rolling and occasionally steep, with wellpads cut into hillsides or occupying flat areas.

Native vegetation In biogeography, a native species is indigenous to a given region or ecosystem if its presence in that region is the result of only local natural evolution (though often popularised as "with no human intervention") during history. The term is equ ...

is a mix of

chaparral Chaparral ( ) is a shrubland plant community and geographical feature found primarily in the U.S. state of California, in southern Oregon, and in the northern portion of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. It is shaped by a Mediterranean c ...

and

oak woodland An oak woodland is a plant community with a tree canopy dominated by oaks (''Quercus spp.''). In terms of canopy closure, oak woodlands are intermediate between oak savanna, which is more open, and oak forest, which is more closed. Although the ...

s (

California montane chaparral and woodlands The California montane chaparral and woodlands is an ecoregion defined by the World Wildlife Fund, spanning of mountains in the Transverse Ranges, Peninsular Ranges, and Coast Ranges of southern and central California. The ecoregion is part of ...

), with some stands of

Bishop pine ''Pinus muricata'', the bishop pine, is a pine with a very restricted range: mostly in California, including several offshore Channel Islands, and a few locations in Baja California, Mexico. It is always on or near the coast. In San Luis Obispo ...

(''Pinus muricata'') on north-facing slopes. The region has a

Mediterranean climate A Mediterranean climate (also called a dry summer temperate climate ''Cs'') is a temperate climate sub-type, generally characterized by warm, dry summers and mild, fairly wet winters; these weather conditions are typically experienced in the ...

, with cool and rainy winters, and dry summers during which the heat is greatly diminished by fog and northwesterly winds from the cold waters of the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

, which is about west of the field. Prevailing winds year-round are from the west-northwest. Approximately of rain falls in a typical winter, with the rainy season lasting from around November to April. Drainage on the south side of the hills is down Harris Canyon, Long Canyon, and Careaga Canyon, to San Antonio Creek, which exits to the ocean through

Vandenberg Air Force Base Vandenberg may refer to: * Vandenberg (surname), including a list of people with the name * USS General Harry Taylor (AP-145), USNS ''General Hoyt S. Vandenberg'' (T-AGM-10), transport ship in the United States Navy, sank as an artificial reef in K ...

. Drainage to the north is to Orcutt Creek, which passes Old Town Orcutt on the north on its way to its juncture with the Santa Maria River and the Pacific Ocean near Guadalupe.

Geology

The Orcutt field is one of several along the Casmalia-Orcutt Anticline, one of several anticlinal structures in the region along which oil fields are found, with the Solomon Hills being the surface expression of this

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 ...

. In the Orcutt field, oil has pooled in a dome-like structure bounded on the north by the Orcutt Fault and on the southwest by the Casmalia Fault, at a minimum depth of in a

diatomite Diatomaceous earth (), diatomite (), or kieselgur/kieselguhr is a naturally occurring, soft, siliceous sedimentary rock that can be crumbled into a fine white to off-white powder. It has a particle size ranging from more than 3 μm to le ...

formation. The deepest oil-producing horizon was not discovered until 1981, and yields oil from about below ground surface.DOGGR, p. 366-369 The capping geologic units are the Sisquoc, Careaga, and

Foxen formation Foxen is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: *Alex Foxen William Alex Foxen (born February 1, 1991) is an American poker player from Huntington, New York. Foxen attended Boston College, where he played tight end on the school's ...

s. The Careaga and Foxen are of

Pliocene The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58diatomaceous Sisquoc is both Pliocene and Upper

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 recen ...

. Beneath these, separated by an

unconformity An unconformity is a buried erosional or non-depositional surface separating two rock masses or strata of different ages, indicating that sediment deposition was not continuous. In general, the older layer was exposed to erosion for an interval o ...

, is the fractured shale of the

Monterey Formation 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 islan ...

which has been richly productive for over 100 years. This is the same producing formation as in many other California oil fields, including the Lompoc Oil Field in the similarly anticlinal ridge of the Purisima Hills to the south, and the Zaca field to the southeast. Oil from the field is heavy in the main Monterey producing horizon, with

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 ...

of 14-17. The Point Sal, discovered in 1905 at a depth of , has lighter oil, with gravity 22-24. Some of the more recently discovered deep horizons, such as the Lospe in the Careaga Area, or the Deep Monterey in the field's Main Area, are lighter yet. These two pools were discovered in 1985 and 1981, respectively.

History, operations, and production

Prospectors long suspected the presence of oil in the Santa Maria Valley and surrounding hills, but the late 19th-century attempts to find it were either shallow or misplaced. Union Oil Co. geologist William Warren Orcutt, for whom the town is named, began exploring the area in 1901, and suggested drilling in the Solomon Hills south of the then small town of Santa Maria. Following his suggestion, the company leased around in the valley and vicinity, including the hills, and began drilling. In October 1901, their third well on the Careaga lease came in at , beginning the field's long history. The most productive well of all, and one of the most productive in the history of the industry, was the result of an accident. In 1904 a drilling crew was transporting their equipment to a pre-determined location, but a road accident on the way upended the boiler they had been carrying. Rather than putting the rig back together and continuing, they decided to make their work easier and drill on the spot. It turned out to be a good idea. "Old Maud", as the well became known, came in as a spectacular gusher, producing and flooding a canyon with oil as crews struggled to contain tens of thousands of barrels of black goo running downhill by hurriedly constructing earthen dams. This well was the largest oil producer on the continent up until this time, with

Spindletop Spindletop is an oil field located in the southern portion of Beaumont, Texas, in the United States. The Spindletop dome was derived from the Louann Salt evaporite layer of the Jurassic geologic period. On January 10, 1901, a well at Spindleto ...

in Texas being a close second.Santa Barbara Independent: History of Orcutt
/ref> It produced over in its long history, not being plugged and abandoned until 1988. The origin of the name "Old Maud" has not been definitively determined; some sources attribute it to the name of a mule, others to a favored town prostitute. Peak oil production from the Orcutt field – or the Santa Maria field as it was known then – occurred early, in 1908, at in that year. By this year the boom town of Orcutt, built to house the oilfield workers, already had approximately 1,000 residents, along with saloons, hotels, and restaurants. Production from the field began to slow after the peak, and in the late 1920s Union Oil, which by then owned the majority of the field, cut production in half. During the boom period, Union Oil built a small company town on the field itself. Bicknell, which still appears on USGS topographic maps, was abandoned in the 1930s, with some of the houses themselves being moved down the hill to Orcutt. At its peak it included a post office, grocery store, and school house, in addition to residences. The school house is the solitary remaining building, and is currently in use by Breitburn Energy, who operates much of the field. In 1947 the name of the field was changed officially from "Santa Maria" to "Orcutt", to differentiate it from the Santa Maria Valley field to the north, discovered in 1934. Several enhanced recovery operations have been used on the field, beginning with waterflooding in 1951 (a technique of filling a depleting reservoir with wastewater, both to dispose of produced water and to increase reservoir pressure, allowing more oil to be pumped out). Both gas injection and alkaline flood operations have been used in the Point Sal horizon in the Main Area.

Unocal Union Oil Company of California, and its holding company Unocal Corporation, together known as Unocal was a major petroleum explorer and marketer in the late 19th century, through the 20th century, and into the early 21st century. It was headqu ...

sold the field in the 1990s along with other assets in California. Other owners have included Nuevo Energy, who sold the field in 2003 to Energy Reserves Group LLC. This company operated the field for one year before selling to Breitburn Energy in 2004 for $46.7 million. Breitburn remains the largest operator on the field. Another operator active as of 2010 is Pacific Resources, LLC, a division of Santa Maria Pacific.Query
for operators on Orcutt Field: California Department of Conservation database

References

{{coord, 34.8241, -120.4059, type:landmark_source:enwiki-googlemaplink, display=title Geography of Santa Barbara County, California Oil fields in Santa Barbara County, California

Setting

Geology

History, operations, and production

See also

References