Venoco, Inc.

Venoco, Inc., Venoco Corporation, or Venoco, is a private American oil and gas exploration and production corporation. It maintains an office in Carpinteria, California, and its corporate headquarters are in Denver. Predominantly active in California, it is a large natural gas producer in the Sacramento Valley and produces oil and gas both onshore and offshore of southern and central California. The company has fields and prospects in Santa Barbara County, Monterey County, Kern County, San Luis Obispo County, and Ventura County. Venoco owns and operates the Santa Clara Avenue Oil Field in Ventura County as well as the South Ellwood Oil Field offshore of Santa Barbara, the Santa Clara Offshore Oil Field and the Sockeye Oil Field in the Santa Barbara Channel, west of Ventura.

Formerly traded on the New York Stock Exchange as VQ, Venoco became a private company again in October 2012 when Tim Marquez, co-founder, arranged financing to buy the outstanding shares of the company stock.

Venoco announced in 2014 that the West Montalvo Oil Field would be sold to an unnamed party for $200 million. While the field had been “a solid asset for Venoco,” the company would use the proceeds to pay off a significant amount of debt. Venoco purchased the oil field in May 2007 from the Berry Petroleum Company for $61.3 million.

Since 2011 Venoco's primary business interest has been developing California's Monterey Formation, particularly portions of the unit that contain large amounts of shale oil potentially recoverable using new technologies, including hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Venoco has obtained 312,000 gross and 214,000 net acres in the Monterey, and has begun producing in the newly delineated Sevier Oil Field in Kern County. Venoco's Monterey acreage is spread across three geologic basins: the San Joaquin (the largest), the Salinas Valley and the Santa Maria Valley.