Carpinteria Offshore Oil Field

Carpinteria Offshore Oil Field
The Carpinteria Offshore Oil Field in the waters off of southern California. Other oil fields are shown in dark gray. Small red squares mark the locations of drilling platforms.
Country	United States
Region	Southern California
Location	Santa Barbara County, both in State and Federal waters
Offshore/onshore	offshore
Operators	Pacific Operators Offshore LLC (PACOPS), Dos Cuadras Offshore Resources (DCOR)
Field history
Discovery	1964
Start of development	1965
Start of production	1965
Peak year	1969
Production
Current production of oil	1,345 barrels per day (~67,020 t/a)
Year of current production of oil	2008
Producing formations	Pico (lower Pliocene)

The Carpinteria Offshore Oil Field is an oil and gas field in Santa Barbara Channel, south of the city of Carpinteria in southern California in the United States. Discovered in 1964, and reaching peak production in 1969, it has produced over 106 million barrels of oil in its lifetime, and retains approximately 2 million barrels in reserve recoverable with present technology, according to the California State Department of Natural Resources. Currently the field is produced from three drilling platforms four to five miles (8 km) offshore, within Federal waters outside of the tidelands zone. Two of the platforms are operated by Pacific Operators Offshore LLC (PACOPS), the operating arm of Carpinteria-based Carone Petroleum; the other platform is operated by Dos Cuadras Offshore Resources (DCOR). The Carpinteria field is the 50th largest field in California by total original oil in place, as of the end of 2008.

The Carpinteria field is one of the only fields offshore California to straddle the line between state and federal waters. The portion of the field in state waters was abandoned in 1996 with the dismantling of the two platforms operated by Chevron.

The oil field is one of many discovered in the 1960s and 1970s underneath the ocean bottom offshore of Southern California. Most of the field is in relatively shallow water, with the water depths ranging from about 120 to 200 feet (61 m). It is about three miles (5 km) long by one half mile across, extending from west-southwest to east-northeast, and has a total productive surface area of approximately 340 acres (1.4 km²).

The field is divided into five leases, with three in the state tidelands zone, and two in the federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) zone. The three drilling and production platforms remaining of the original five are in the western part of the field, arranged in a line running from west to east, with Henry on the west, followed by Platform Houchin and Platform Hogan, with Hogan nearest to the state tidelands boundary and the shore. Oil and gas from Platform Henry moves via undersea pipeline to DCOR's Rincon Plant processing facility, and oil and gas from Houchin and Hogan runs to PACOPS's La Conchita Plant, about two miles (3 km) northwest of the Rincon Facility, near the town of La Conchita.

The three platforms are in 154 to 173 feet (53 m) of water, and range from 3.7 to 4.3 miles (6.9 km) from land.

Along with the Dos Cuadras field to the west, the Carpinteria offshore field is part of a larger anticlinal trend beginning on land north of Ventura with the Ventura Oil Field, and continuing with breaks west through the San Miguelito and Rincon oil fields, then running offshore to the Carpinteria and Dos Cuadras fields underneath the Santa Barbara Channel.