California Oil

Sources of Petroleum Consumed in State For second quarter 1989 6%: Foreign (Indonesia) 44%: From Alaska 50%: Produced in California Key Producing Counties California is a net exporter of oil.(It goes basically to Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Nevada.) California imported 101,000 barrels a day and exported 215,500 barrels a day in the second quarter of 1989 (latest figures available). 71%: Kern 13%: Los Angeles 4%: Ventura 12%: All other counties Where Oil Goes Second quarter (April-June)

TAFT, Calif. - This two-stoplight town was built on petroleum, and residents here never miss a chance to pay tribute. A 38-foot monument to wildcatters stands downtown; locals brag it's the tallest bronze sculpture west of the Mississippi. Every five years, the city throws an "Oildorado" festival. There's even a beauty pageant in which young women dubbed "the maids of petroleum" vie to be crowned queen. It's all an homage to the bustling days when Taft boasted two giant oil fields and Standard Oil Co. of California was headquartered there.

William Henry Doheny Sr., 83, a descendant of California oil pioneers and longtime director on the board of Unocal Corp., died Jan. 12 in Los Angeles. The cause of death was not announced. Doheny was the grandson of E.L. Doheny, one of the founders of the Southern California oil industry. William Doheny served during World War II in the U.S. Navy Reserve and commanded the high-speed transport Ira Jeffery. He earned a bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 1949.

California's Monterey shale, which holds an estimated 15 billion barrels of oil, has been touted as crucial to the state's energy future and a boon to its economy. A study released Thursday tries to quantify the potential economic benefits. The study by USC and the Communications Institute, a Los Angeles think tank, estimates that development of the 1,750-square-mile formation in central California could generate half a million new jobs by 2015 and 2.8 million by 2020. Tapping the Monterey shale, which  holds an estimated two-thirds of the country's shale oil reserves, would probably require some combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, a practice opposed by many environmentalists worried about possible damage to land and water.

California is laced with fabled roadways: Highway 1, the Golden State, El Camino Real, Route 66 and many others. Some follow the footpaths of padres, the trails of wagon trains. And some are monuments to the Freeway Age and California's bearhug embrace of Car Culture. State Highway 33 will not be confused with any of these asphalt icons. Nobody's likely to write a song about Highway 33, although in one stretch it does cut through Buck Owens country.

In the sidebar "California Oil," on Page T6 of The Times' Special Report on the Huntington Beach oil spill, the first words of the text are "California is a net exporter of oil . . . " That simply isn't true, as is clearly shown by the pie chart at the left of the same piece. The facts are: 1) California, onshore and offshore, produces about a million barrels of crude oil per day. 2) California consumes about 2 million barrels of crude oil per day. 3) Virtually all of the million-barrel-per-day difference enters California by tanker, either from Alaska or Indonesia.

Tesoro Petroleum Corp., which bought refineries in Utah and North Dakota in November, agreed to pay $1.08 billion in cash for a California oil refinery that U.S. regulators required Valero Energy Corp. to sell. The 168,000 barrel-a-day Golden Eagle plant outside San Francisco would increase Tesoro's capacity by about 40% to almost 560,000 barrels a day, the company said. Tesoro also is gaining 70 Beacon gasoline stations in Northern California and would own about 750 stations after the purchase.

Secret negotiations have cleared away the key obstacle to lifting the ban on export of Alaskan crude oil, a move that could lead to the revival of California's moribund oil industry and create thousands of jobs in the state. Independent California oil producers estimate that ending the export ban could trim more than $2 billion annually from the U.S. trade deficit with Japan, the likeliest market for the oil. Until now, U.S. maritime unions--whose crews by law now tanker the Alaskan oil to U.S.

A ranking Interior Department official, in a cross fire from the oil industry, conservationists and the governor, said Wednesday that there is no assurance that oil and gas leases off the Northern California coast will be sold in two years as scheduled. In addition, plans to initiate the leasing process off the Southern California coast in May also may be delayed, Assistant Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles said.

SHAFTER - In this lush pocket of Kern County, where the agriculture and oil industries have long coexisted, Mike Hopkins' almond orchard has become a battlefield in a dispute that extends to the governor's office. Hopkins is standing up to the oil industry - and Gov. Jerry Brown - by filing a lawsuit against the state to bar energy company Venoco Inc. from drilling an exploratory well on his farm without a full environmental review. Venoco has the mineral rights to Hopkins' 38-acre farm.

For nearly two decades, Santosh Arya has pumped some of the San Diego area's cheapest gas at his three Homeland Petroleum stations. But his streak ended early this month, when wholesale prices started rising sharply, then shot up 40 cents a gallon overnight. To break even, Arya calculated he would have to sell a gallon of regular at $5.10 -- almost a buck higher than at nearby Shell and 76 stations. Instead, he shut down and waited for prices to drop. "I've never seen anything like it," said Arya, who said he lost $2,000 a day while hanging "out of gas" signs on his pumps.

Chevron Corp. said first-quarter profit rose 4.2% as rising oil prices offset falling natural gas prices. Net income for the first three months of the year increased to $6.47 billion, or $3.27 a share, from $6.21 billion, or $3.09,a year earlier, the San Ramon, Calif., company reported Friday. Revenue for the world's third-largest publicly traded oil company rose to $60.71 billion, compared with $60.34 billion in the first quarter last year. The company's financial performance was hurt by a sharp year-to-year decline in natural gas prices, but that drop was more than offset by sharply higher oil prices.

It almost seemed as though oil drilling rigs were ready to tap into Los Angeles' first petroleum field again. But the workers setting up a pair of derricks south of Echo Park last week were plugging some of the city's oldest wells — not drilling new ones. The sealing of the long-abandoned wells by Allenco Energy to make way for a 45-unit affordable housing project marks the end of an era for the Los Angeles City Oil Field, which sparked Southern California's oil boom 120 years ago. The city's first commercially successful oil well was drilled about 350 feet away, at the corner of Glendale Boulevard and Rockwood Street.

Oil and gasoline prices began the new year on the same rising course that closed out 2010. Crude oil for February delivery jumped to $92.66 a barrel, a 26-month high, before settling at $91.55, up 17 cents, on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil last settled above $92 a barrel Oct. 3, 2008, when it closed at $93.88. Higher crude oil costs have been pushing up pump prices since early December. On Monday, the average U.S. pump price climbed 1.8 cents to $3.07 a gallon, according to the Energy Department's weekly survey of service stations around the U.S. California's average gained 2.1 cents to $3.308 a gallon.

Horrific though the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been, its output is still short of what occurred a century ago in scrubby brush about 110 miles north of Los Angeles — site of the Lakeview gusher. While some experts believe the well off Louisiana has spewed upwards of 60 million gallons of oil into the gulf, the Lakeview well rained about 378 million gallons over an area between the towns of Taft and Maricopa. The spill following the April 20 oil rig explosion in the gulf is, of course, a much bigger environmental and economic disaster.

Seventeen congressmen from California urged Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. on Monday to disavow a federal task force report that calls for the export of oil produced by onshore wells in California, calling the recommendation "startling confirmation" that no need exists for further development in coastal waters. The little-noticed study, led by the Commerce Department and submitted to Congress early this year, calls for lifting restrictions on exports.

An effort by a coalition of Santa Barbara environmental groups to strike a deal with a Texas oil company was revived Wednesday, kicking off another round in the battle over how to confront pressure to drill for oil off the California coast. Activists with the Environmental Defense Center, a Central Coast advocacy group, announced that they have reworked some of the most controversial elements of a 2008 agreement struck with Houston-based Plains Exploration & Production Co. They said they hope the move will defuse opposition that has so far stymied the deal, which would permit new drilling off the Santa Barbara coast in exchange for limits on future oil operations.

California is laced with fabled roadways: Highway 1, the Golden State, El Camino Real, Route 66 and many others. Some follow the footpaths of padres, the trails of wagon trains. And some are monuments to the Freeway Age and California's bearhug embrace of Car Culture. State Highway 33 will not be confused with any of these asphalt icons. Nobody's likely to write a song about Highway 33, although in one stretch it does cut through Buck Owens country.