The Elk Hills Oil Field (formerly the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 1) is a large oil field in northwestern Kern County, in the Elk Hills of the San Joaquin Valley, California in the United States, about twenty miles (32 km) west of Bakersfield. Discovered in 1911, and having a cumulative production of close to 1.3 billion barrels (210,000 dam³) of oil at the end of 2006, it is the fifth-largest oil field in California, and the seventh-most productive field in the United States. Its estimated remaining reserves, as of the end of 2006, were around 107 million barrels (17,000 dam³), and it had 2,387 active oil-producing wells. It is by an order of magnitude the largest natural gas-producing oil field in California, having produced over 2 trillion cubic feet (57 km3) of gas since its discovery, and retaining over 700 billion cubic feet (20,000,000 dam³) in reserve, making it even larger than the Rio Vista Gas Field, the largest non-associated natural gas field in the state.
The principal operator on the field is Occidental of Elk Hills, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. Largely as a consequence of their operations at Elk Hills, Occidental is the third-largest petroleum producer in California.
Read more about Elk Hills Oil Field: Setting, Geology, Production and Political History, Ecology
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