The San Joaquin Valley 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 the valley 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.

Over a century later, the San Joaquin Valley still produces a lot of oil. In fact, the Kern County part of the valley in 2014 had 44,518 producing oil wells, with another 2,098 producing wells in Fresno County. Historically, about 54% of all the oil produced in California has come from the San Joaquin Valley, but The valley for the year 2014 produced about 74% of all the oil produced in the state. Furthermore, oil produced from the San Joaquin Valley in 2014 represents about 4.8% of the entire United States production, and about 0.5% of the total world oil production for the year. The valley ranks behind Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, and North Dakota as the fourth largest oil producing region in the United States.

The San Joaquin Valley is also home to 22  giant oil fields that have produced over 100 million barrels of oil each, with four "super giants" that have produced over 1 billion barrels of oil. Among these "super gaints" are Midway-Sunset, which is the largest oil field in the lower 49 United States, and Elk Hills, which is the former U.S. Naval Petroleum Reserve. The aforementioned 22 giant fields are responsible for 95% of the cumulative historic production, and they were responsible in 2014 for 96% of the annual production for the entire San Joaquin Valley.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

Giant Oil Fields of the San Joaquin Valley

RANK	FIELD	DATE	TOTAL PRODUCTION THROUGH 2014
1	Midway-Sunset	1894	3,131 million barrels of oil
2	Kern River	1899	2.195 million barrels of oil
3	South Belridge	1911	1,687 million barrels of oil
4	Elk Hills	1911	1,397 million barrels of oil
5	*Coalinga	1887	958 million barrels of oil
6	Buena Vista	1909	675 million barrels of oil
7	Cymric	1909	587 million barrels of oil
8	*Coalinga East Extension	1928	504 million barrels of oil
9	*Kettleman North Dome	1928	459 million barrels of oil
10	Lost Hills	1910	458 million barrels of oil
11	McKittrick	1896	322 million barrels of oil
12	Mount Poso	1926	304 million barrels of oil
13	Kern Front	1912	232 million barrels of oil
14	North Coles Levee	1938	166 million barrels of oil
15	North Belridge	1912	160 million barrels of oil
16	Edison	1928	154 million barrels of oil
17	Round Mountain	1927	133 million barrels of oil
18	Fruitvale	1928	128 million barrels of oil
19	Rio Bravo	1937	120 million barrels of oil
20	Greeley	1936	117 million barrels of oil
21	Yowlumne	1974	113 million barrels of oil
22	Poso Creek	1938	105 million barrels of oil
23	Mountain View	1933	92 million barrels of oil
24	Ten Section	1936	86 million barrels of oil
25	Paloma	1934	62 million barrels of oil
26	South Coles Levee	1938	60 million barrels of oil
*San Joaquin Valley fields located in Fresno County
	San Joaquin Valley District 4 (Kern Co.) District 5 (Fresno Co.)		15.2 billion barrels of oil 13.1 billion barrels  2.1 billion barrels
	California		28.3 billion barrels of oil

The graph below shows the cumulative annual oil production from the San Joaquin Valley from 1900 to 2000 - a century of oil! Note how as time has gone by light oil has become less and less important to the San Joaquin Valley oil industry, and heavy oil has become more important. This trend is going to continue into the future.

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.

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