Salt Lake Oil Field

The Salt Lake Oil Field is an oil field underneath the city of Los Angeles, California. Discovered in 1902, and developed quickly in the following years, the Salt Lake field was once the most productive in California; over 50 million barrels of oil have been extracted from it, mostly in the first part of the twentieth century, although modest drilling and extraction from the field using an urban "drilling island" resumed in 1962. As of 2009, the only operator on the field was Plains Exploration & Production (PXP). The field is also notable as being the source, by long-term seepage of crude oil to the ground surface along the 6th Street Fault, of the famous La Brea Tar Pits.

The adjacent and geologically related South Salt Lake Oil Field, not discovered until 1970, is still productive from an urban drillsite it shares with the nearby Beverly Hills Oil Field, also run by Plains Exploration and Production.

The field is one of many in the Los Angeles Basin. Immediately to the west is the San Vicente Oil Field, and to the southwest the large Beverly Hills Oil Field. To the east are the Los Angeles City Oil Field and Los Angeles Downtown Oil Fields, the former one of the earliest to be drilled in the basin, and the one responsible along with the Salt Lake Field for the early twentieth-century oil boom in the area. Abutting the field to the southwest is the recently discovered and still active South Salt Lake Oil Field. The land above the two oil fields has a mean elevation of approximately 200 feet (61 m) above sea level, and slopes gently towards the south-southwest, away from the Santa Monica Mountains, draining via Ballona Creek towards Santa Monica Bay in the Pacific Ocean.

The productive region of the field is approximately three miles long by one mile across, with the long axis west to east along and parallel to Beverly Boulevard, from near its intersection with La Cienega Boulevard to past its intersection with Highland Avenue. All of the area is within the city of Los Angeles, and is heavily urbanized, making the Salt Lake Field one of a very few active oil fields in the United States in an entirely urban setting. While the entire former field area is dotted with abandoned wells, now entirely overbuilt with dense residential and commercial development, all active drilling takes place from a shielded, soundproofed drilling island adjacent to the Beverly Center, east of San Vicente Boulevard between Beverly Blvd. and 3rd Street. Since normal vertical drilling is impractical in a dense urban environment – active oil wells are loud, malodorous, and generally make poor neighbors – drilling from the tightly clustered wells in the island is directional, with wells slanting into different parts of the formation, similar to the technique used for drilling offshore fields from oil platforms. Only eleven wells, all in this drilling enclosure, remain active of the more than 450 once scattered over the landscape now known as Midtown Los Angeles. Other wells within the enclosure produce from the adjacent San Vicente and Beverly Hills fields.

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Wikipedia