Oxy gained significant experience with shale production following our 1998 acquisition of Elk Hills Field in Kern County, California. This prolific oilfield contains a number of shale zones — porous rock that contains hydrocarbons but has little permeability. Oil and gas in such formations will not flow into a well without stimulation or special recovery processes.
More than one-fourth of Oxy’s California production currently is from shales.
Attributes of the California Shales
California shale reservoirs contain abundant interbedded siltstones. Like the Bakken shale in North Dakota and Montana and the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas, the California shales have abundant hydrocarbons currently in place. They compare favorably to the Bakken and Eagle Ford on such factors as total organic content, gross thickness, depth, porosity and permeability.
Oxy’s Shale Program
Oxy is applying the expertise gained from exploring and producing Elk Hills’ shale zones to some of its other California assets, including properties in the Los Angeles, Ventura and San Joaquin basins.
Oxy is undertaking a four-year development program to appraise over 20 billion barrels of potential oil in place* from our shale acreage in these locations, and studying stimulation methods, interval production, reservoir characterization and reservoir management techniques.
*The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) permits oil and natural gas companies, in their SEC filings, to disclose only reserves anticipated to be economically producible, as of a given date, by application of development projects to known accumulations. We use certain terms in this website, such as potential oil in place, that the SEC’s guidelines strictly prohibit us from using in our SEC filings.