A few years ago, Occidental Petroleum Corp. executive Stephen I. Chazen sounded like a cryptologist out of a Dan Brown novel as he told investors that an oil bonanza awaited any outfit that could "crack the code" of California's seismically fractured underground.
Occidental's engineers may have done it.
The Westwood company revealed in July that it had found the equivalent of 150 million to 250 million barrels of oil and natural gas in an undisclosed part of Kern County using techniques that the oil company's executives would rather not talk about. It was California's biggest find in 35 years.
Some experts say it could herald a period of new exploration in California and the U.S.
"Certainly this kind of success will send other people back to California to rethink the geology and rethink the theories of the area," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power."
Joe Hahn knows firsthand the significance of finding that much crude in California.
A former oil reservoir engineer for Arco, now owned by oil giant BP, Hahn said that exploration in the state has been rife with failures and false leads.
"We had considerable acreage that turned out to be good as goat pasture," said Hahn, now a professor at Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management. "It's very rare to have a find of this size" this late in California's oil-production history.
Despite steady declines in petroleum output to about 214.5 million barrels last year from about 394 million barrels at the 1985 peak, California still ranks fourth in the nation behind the combined federal offshore drilling sites and Texas and Alaska.
Bruce Bullock, executive director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said there has been renewed interest in many old oil regions long believed to have given up most or all of their crude.
"We're seeing quite a bit of activity," Bullock said. "A: They think they can find more oil; B: They think they can get it out of the ground."
Over the last decade, Occidental has been actively acquiring leases and drilling rights in California as most other big oil companies have been selling out. But Occidental executives weren't the only people who thought that California might have a surprising amount of oil left to exploit.
