Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field

The Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field is a large oil and gas field underneath the Santa Barbara Channel about eight miles southeast of Santa Barbara, California. Discovered in 1968, and with a cumulative production of over 260 million barrels of oil, it is the 24th-largest oil field within California and the adjacent waters. As it is in the Pacific Ocean outside of the 3-mile tidelands limit, it is a federally leased field, regulated by the U.S. Department of the Interior rather than the California Department of Conservation. It is entirely produced from four drilling platforms in the channel, which as of 2009 were operated by Dos Cuadras Offshore Resources (DCOR), LLC, a private firm based in Ventura. A blowout near one of these platforms – Unocal's Platform A – was responsible for the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that was formative for the modern environmental movement, and spurred the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act.

The Dos Cuadras field is one of many underneath the ocean bottom offshore of Southern California, most of which were discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. All of the field is outside of the 3-mile geographic limit, making it subject to U.S. government rather than California regulation. The four platforms are arranged in a line running from east to west, spaced one-half mile apart, with Platform Hillhouse on the east, and Platforms "A", "B", and "C" in order to the west.

A pair of undersea pipelines, one for oil and one for gas, connect the four platforms to the shore near La Conchita. Oil and gas produced on the Dos Cuadras field are pumped about 12 miles east to the Rincon Oil & Gas Processing Plant on a hilltop adjacent to the Rincon Oil Field, about a mile southeast of La Conchita. From there oil travels down to Ventura along Venoco's M-143 pipeline to the Ventura pump station, and then to Los Angeles area refineries by way of a TOSCO pipeline in the Santa Clara River Valley.

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