Oxnard Oil Field

The Oxnard Oil Field is a large and currently productive oil field in and adjacent to the city of Oxnard, in Ventura County, California in the United States. Its conventional oil reserves are close to exhaustion, with only an estimated one percent of the original oil recoverable with current technology remaining: out of an original 43.5 million. However, the reservoir includes an enormous deposit of tar sands, ultra-heavy oil classed as an unconventional petroleum reserve, and potentially containing of oil equivalent, should it become economically feasible to extract. p. 6-8 Present operators on the field include Tri-Valley Oil & Gas Co., Anterra Energy Services, Inc., Chase Production Co., and Occidental Petroleum through its Vintage Production subsidiary. p. 97, 122, 118, 160 As of the beginning of 2009, there were 34 active wells on the field.

Geographic setting

The Oxnard Oil Field is one of several beneath the Oxnard Plain, an area mostly protected agricultural land with the communities of Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo separated by greenbelts. In the vicinity of the oil field, agriculture remains the predominant land use, and oil wells, processing facilities, and associated infrastructure are interspersed with fields planted with crops such as strawberries, broccoli, and onions. Parts of the field, particularly on the west, have been given over to light industrial and commercial development as the Oxnard metropolitan area expands to the east. U.S. Highway 101 bounds the field on the north; California State Route 34 (Oxnard's East 5th Street) cuts across it from east to west, and Rice Avenue crosses it from north to south. Most of the currently active oil wells are in the eastern portion of the field, west of the intersection of 5th Street and Pleasant Valley Road. Some active wells remain west of Rice Avenue, and a group of wells using directional drilling is clustered together in a drilling island near the northeast corner of the intersection of Rose Avenue and Wooley Road. The total productive area of the field projected to the surface is .DOGGR, p. 371

The climate in the region is Mediterranean, with cool, rainy winters and warm, rainless summers, in which the heat is moderated by frequent morning coastal low clouds and fog. Annual precipitation is around , almost all in the winter, and all in the form of rain. The mean annual temperature is 56 to ; freezes occur rarely.
Elevations on the field range from about 40 to above sea level. It is mostly flat, with a very gentle slope to the south-southeast; drainage is along Revolon Slough to Calleguas Creek to Mugu Lagoon, and then to the Pacific Ocean.

Geology

The Oxnard field is within the Ventura Basin Province of southern California. Geologically, this area is part of a structural downwarp that occurred during the late Pliocene and mostly marine. Oil accumulations, of which there are many in the Ventura province, mainly occur in anticlinal settings modified by faulting; stratigraphy is also influential in creating traps for hydrocarbons. Where the sedimentary rocks are sandstones with high porosity, and the structure and stratigraphy allow hydrocarbons to be trapped on their upward migration, oilfields are found.

As the oil field is in the center of a large flat alluvial floodplain, there is no surface expression of any anticlinal structure capable of holding oil. Under the surface alluvium, a series of relatively impermeable sedimentary units cap the petroleum-bearing formation. On top are the Pleistocene San Pedro and Pleistocene-upper Pliocene

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