The Elk Hills Oilfield

By Dr. Clifford Jones, Aberdeen University.

The Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005 necessitated withdrawal from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which requires the permission of the President of the US. The SPR consists of about 700 million barrels of crude oil stored in salt caverns along the Louisiana coast. The Reserve was established during the presidency of Gerald Ford, partly because of the stoppage of exports of oil to
the US from OPEC countries for a period in 1973-74. Reserves of oil for contingencies was not at that time a new idea. One of Gerald Ford’s predecessors William Howard Taft, who was president from 1909
to 1913, set aside certain oil fields as strategic reserves including one of the best known, namely Elk Hills in California. The difference between such reserves and the SPR is of course that in the latter oil has been taken out of the well and stored, possibly after long transportation; by no means all of the oil in the SPR is domestic oil. The reserves established President Taft consisted of crude oil in situ. Nine years after Elk Hills was so reserved there was a major fire at one of the wells there, extinguished after nearly four weeks of steady burning by use of explosives.

Elk Hills is no longer a Government facility having been acquired in 1998 by Occidental in what, in monetary terms, was the largest privatisation ever in the US. Since then many new wells have been drilled at the field, sometimes using horizontal drilling techniques. Extension of the Elk field since its privatisation is said to have caused the loss of some sites of significance to the Kitanemuk Indians, generations of whom lived at the site before oil production began there. The treaty which allowed drilling to commence at Elk Hills in the mid nineteenth century had a member of the Kitanemuk as one of its signatories: his great-grandson has been one of the critics of the recent extensions.

Interestingly, the Act of Congress of 1910 which enabled President Taft to make the Elk Field into a strategic reserve also applied to specified deposits of shale in the Colorado desert which, at the time of writing in 2006, have not yet been developed in any way.