“Most interestingly, the islands were designed to blend in with the surrounding coastal environment,” explained LAAPL Education Chair Blake W.E.
#HIDDEN ISLANDS PROFESSIONAL#
oilfield, according to the Los Angeles Association of Professional Landmen, whose members toured the facilities in November 2017. The California Resources Corporation operates the offshore part on the islands of the Wilmington field, the fourth-largest U.S. Meanwhile, all of this happens amidst the scenic boating and tourist waters in Long Beach Harbor. The challenge was once described as “a massive Rubik’s Cube of oil pockets, fault blocks, fluid pressures and piping systems.” To counter subsidence, five 1,750-horsepower motors on White Island drive water injection pumps to offset extracted petroleum, sustain reservoir pressures, and extend oil recovery. Today the four islands, a total of 42 acres, include about 1,000 active wells producing 46,000 barrels of oil and 9 million cubic feet of natural gas every day.
Photo by Roger Coar, 1959, courtesy Long Beach Historical Society. The prospering but “sinking city” of Long Beach would solve its subsidence problem with four islands and advanced drilling and production technologies. The islands in 1967 were named Grissom, White, Chaffee, and Freemen in honor of lost Nasa astronauts. They built four artificial islands at a cost of $22 million (in 1965 dollars). The city’s charter had prohibited such drilling since a 1956 referendum, but advances in oilfield technologies enabled Long Beach to stay afloat.ĭirectional drilling and water injection opened another 6,500 acres of the Wilmington field - and saved the sinking city.įive oil companies formed a Long Beach company called THUMS: Texaco (now Chevron), Humble (now ExxonMobil), Union Oil (now Chevron), Mobil (now ExxonMobil) and Shell Oil Company. On February 27, 1962, Long Beach voters approved “controlled exploration and exploitation of the oil and gas reserves” underlying their harbor. TIME magazine call the bustling port “America’s Sinking City.”Īfter decades of prospering from petroleum production, the city prohibited “offshore area” drilling to slow the subsidence as the community looked for a solution. Earth scientists noted that between 19, the community sank almost 30 feet. By 1923, oil production reached more than one-quarter million barrels of oil per day from Signal Hill, seen in the distance in this detail from a panorama from the Library of Congress.Īlthough Californians had experience dealing with groundwater induced subsidence and the building damage it caused, by 1951 Long Beach was sinking at the alarming rate of about two feet each year. Petroleum reserves brought drilling booms to southern California.
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