page_title: Orcutt Oil Field
section_title: History, operations, and production
hierarchical_section_title: Orcutt Oil Field / History, operations, and production
caption_attribution_description: English: Undated photo of Orcutt Oil Field, 1911 or earlier. Photo is marked "Judkins Studio, Santa Maria" in lower right-hand corner.
context_page_description: The Orcutt Oil Field is a large oil field in the Solomon Hills south of Orcutt, in Santa Barbara County, California. Discovered in 1901 by William Warren Orcutt, it was the first giant field to be found in Santa Barbara County, and its development led to the boom town of Orcutt, now the major unincorporated southern suburb of Santa Maria. With a cumulative production in 2008 of 870,000 barrels of oil, it is the largest onshore producing field in Santa Barbara County.
  The Orcutt field was called the "Santa Maria Field" until the discovery of the larger Santa Maria Valley Oil Field on the plain to the north, an area which is now largely covered with the urban and suburban development. Several oil companies, including Breitburn Energy and Phoenix Energy, LLC are still actively producing from the Orcutt field. The field, mostly located on the old Careaga family ranch, also contains the remains of the ghost town of Bicknell, a company town built for oil workers in the early years of the 20th century, but abandoned in the mid-1930s.
context_section_description: Prospectors long suspected the presence of oil in the Santa Maria Valley and surrounding hills, but the late 19th-century attempts to find it were either shallow or misplaced.  Union Oil Co. geologist William Warren Orcutt, for whom the town is named, began exploring the area in 1901, and suggested drilling in the Solomon Hills south of the then small town of Santa Maria.  Following his suggestion, the company leased around 70,000 acres (280 km²) in the valley and vicinity, including the hills, and began drilling.  In October 1901, their third well on the Careaga lease came in at 150 barrels per day (24 m³/d), beginning the field's long history.
  The most productive well of all, and one of the most productive in the history of the industry, was the result of an accident.  In 1904 a drilling crew was transporting their equipment to a pre-determined location, but a road accident on the way upended the boiler they had been carrying.  Rather than putting the rig back together and continuing, they decided to make their work easier and drill on the spot.  It turned out to be a good idea.  "Old Maud", as the well became known, came in as a spectacular gusher, producing 12,000 barrels per day (1,900 m³/d) and flooding a canyon with oil as crews struggled to contain tens of thousands of barrels of black goo running downhill by hurriedly constructing earthen dams.  This well was the largest oil producer on the continent up until this time, with Spindletop in Texas being a close second.  It produced over 2 million barrels (320,000 m³) in its long history, not being plugged and abandoned until 1988.  The origin of the name "Old Maud" has not been definitively determined; some sources attribute it to the name of a mule, others to a favored town prostitute.
  Peak oil production from the Orcutt field – or the Santa Maria field as it was known then – occurred early, in 1908, at 8.7 million barrels (1,380,000 m³) in that year.  By this year the boom town of Orcutt, built to house the oilfield workers, already had approximately 1,000 residents, along with saloons, hotels, and restaurants.  Production from the field began to slow after the peak, and in the late 1920s Union Oil, which by then owned the majority of the field, cut production in half.  During the boom period, Union Oil built a small company town on the field itself.  Bicknell, which still appears on USGS topographic maps, was abandoned in the 1930s, with some of the houses themselves being moved down the hill to Orcutt.  At its peak it included a post office, grocery store, and school house, in addition to residences.  The school house is the solitary remaining building, and is currently in use by Breitburn Energy, who operates much of the field.
  In 1947 the name of the field was changed officially from "Santa Maria" to "Orcutt", to differentiate it from the Santa Maria Valley field to the north, discovered in 1934.
  Several enhanced recovery operations have been used on the field, beginning with waterflooding in 1951 (a technique of filling a depleting reservoir with wastewater, both to dispose of produced water and to increase reservoir pressure, allowing more oil to be pumped out).  Both gas injection and alkaline flood operations have been used in the Point Sal horizon in the Main Area.
  Unocal sold the field in the 1990s along with other assets in California.  Other owners have included Nuevo Energy, who sold the field in 2003 to Energy Reserves Group LLC.  This company operated the field for one year before selling to Breitburn Energy in 2004 for $46.7 million.  Breitburn remains the largest operator on the field.  Another operator active as of 2010 is Pacific Resources, LLC, a division of Santa Maria Pacific.
caption: Orcutt field, looking north from the Solomon Hills.  Detail of a panorama; around 1910.
exif: {}