Facts about Kern County Oil

The Kern County Oil Industry

Except for a couple of mediocre wells on the "westside" of the
San Joaquin Valley, and a few
tar mining operations, farming was the mainstay of Kern County in the late 1800s. However, the 1899 discovery of "black gold" in a shallow hand-dug oil well on the west bank of the Kern River changed all that. The Kern River discovery started an oil boom, and a forest of wooden derricks sprang up overnight on the flood plain just north of Bakersfield, a sleepy farm town known to most as "Bakers Swamp". Soon Kern River production accounted for 7 out of every 10 barrels of oil that came from California, and Kern River field by 1903 had made California the top oil-producing state in the country.

Inspired by the Kern River discovery, "oil prospectors" fanned out across the San Joaquin Valley, and derricks began to pop up everywhere. Many discoveries followed, and a string of spectacular gushers at Coalinga, McKittrick and Midway-Sunset fields kept the valley in the oil news. And of course, there was the Lakeview Gusher . . . the greatest oil well the west, for that matter the country, has ever known.

Nearly a century later, the San Joaquin Valley still produces a lot of oil, and Kern County produces more oil than any other county in the valley. In fact, about 31,000 producing wells in Kern County provide 66% of all the oil produced in California, 10% of the total oil production in the entire United States, and about 1% of the total world oil production. If Kern County was a state in its own right, it would rank right behind Texas, Alaska and Louisiana as the fourth largest oil producer in the country. Kern County is also home to 18 giant oil fields that have produced over 100 million barrels of oil each, including four "super giants" that have each produced over 1 billion barrels of oil. Among these "super gaints" are Midway-Sunset . . . the largest oil field in the lower 49 United States, and Elk Hills . . . the former U.S. Naval Petroleum Reserve.

1997
Texas	1,620,000 barrels of oil per day
Alaska	1,380,000 barrels of oil per day
Lousiana	1,250,000 barrels of oil per day
California	943,000 barrels of oil per day
Kern County	577,000 barrels of oil per day
Oklahoma	233,000 barrels of oil per day
Wyoming	204,000 barrels of oil per day

1999
Texas	1,464,000 barrels of oil per day
Lousiana	1,333,000 barrels of oil per day
Alaska	1,044,000 barrels of oil per day
California	876,000 barrels of oil per day
Kern County	560,000 barrels of oil per day
Oklahoma	193,000 barrels of oil per day

Giant Oil Fields of Kern County

RANK	FIELD	DATE	TOTAL PRODUCTION THROUGH 2000
1	Midway-Sunset	1894	2,596 million barrels of oil
2	Kern River	1899	1,760 million barrels of oil
3	South Belridge	1911	1,237 million barrels of oil
4	Elk Hills	1911	1,174 million barrels of oil
*	Coalinga	1887	874 million barrels of oil
5	Buena Vista	1909	662 million barrels of oil
*	Coalinga East Extension	1928	504 million barrels of oil
*	Kettleman North Dome	1928	458 million barrels of oil
6	Cymric	1909	346 million barrels of oil
7	Lost Hills	1910	300 million barrels of oil
8	Mount Poso	1926	294 million barrels of oil
9	McKittrick	1896	288 million barrels of oil
10	Kern Front	1912	199 million barrels of oil
11	North Coles Levee	1938	163 million barrels of oil
12	Edison	1928	144 million barrels of oil
13	Fruitvale	1928	121 million barrels of oil
14	Rio Bravo	1937	117 million barrels of oil
15	Greeley	1936	115 million barrels of oil
16	North Belridge	1912	112 million barrels of oil
17	Yowlumne	1974	108 million barrels of oil
18	Round Mountain	1927	101 million barrels of oil
19	Mountain View	1933	89 million barrels of oil
20	Ten Section	1936	84 million barrels of oil
	Poso Creek	1938	83 million barrels of oil
	Paloma	1934	61 million barrels of oil
	South Coles Levee	1938	59 million barrels of oil
*San Joaquin Valley fields located in Fresno County
	Kern County		12.8 billion barrels of oil
	California		25.2 billion barrels of oil

Did You Know?

A little known fact is that the southern San Joaquin Valley, and Kern County in particular, produces a tremendous amount of electricity through a process called steam cogeneration. Because about two-thirds of the oil produced in California is "heavy" (in other words, too thick and viscous to flow on its own), steam is pumped into the ground to heat the oil and make it behave more like water and less like molasses. Thus, steam injection makes the oil more mobile and enables it to flow into wells where it can be produced.

Cogeneration simply means using steam to first turn turbines and produce electricity before the steam is pumped into the subsurface to heat the heavy oil the sandstone reservoirs.

Enough electricity is produced through cogeneration in the southern San Joaquin Valley to supply the power needs for more than 1.5 million homes. This far exceeds the energy requirements of Kern County, so the excess electricity is sent south over the mountains to power-hungry Los Angeles. Were it not for oil-related cogeneration, the electricity bills of Los Angeles residents would be much higher than they are today.

To learn more about oil and gas click this link for a list of sites
on the SJGS home page!