South Belridge Oil Field

The South Belridge Oil Field in Southern and Central California. Other oil fields are shown in gray.

The South Belridge Oil Field is a large oil field in northwestern Kern County, San Joaquin Valley, California, about forty miles west of Bakersfield. Discovered in 1911, and having a cumulative production of over 2,000 million barrels (320,000,000 m3) of oil equivalent at the end of 2023, it is the fourth-largest oil field in California, after the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, Kern River Oil Field, and Wilmington Oil Field, and is the sixth-most productive field in the United States. Its estimated remaining reserves, as of the end of 2008, were around 494 million barrels (78,500,000 m3) out of approximately 10.2 billion barrels of original oil in place, and it had 6,253 active wells.[1][2] The principal operator on the field was Aera Energy LLC, a joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil. Additionally, the field included the only onshore wells in California owned and operated by ExxonMobil.[3]

  1. ^ https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2012/3050/fs2012-3050.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  2. ^ "2008 Report of the state oil & gas supervisor" (PDF). Department of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources. California Department of Conservation ("DOGGR 2009"). 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 25, 2017. Retrieved October 29, 2011. p. 63.
  3. ^ DOGGR (2009), 127