Greka Energy, legally HVI Cat Canyon Inc., is a privately held company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration principally in Santa Barbara County, California.

Formed in 1999 after the acquisition and merger of several smaller firms, it is a subsidiary of Greka Integrated, Inc., a holding company headquartered in Santa Maria, California, and is wholly owned by Randeep Grewal.

[3] Greka focuses on petroleum extraction and asphalt processing in California, with holdings in Santa Barbara, Ventura, Kern, and Orange Counties.

[6] In 1998, with his newly purchased Horizontal Ventures, which was then a private entity, Randeep Grewal acquired the assets of Petro Union, which was just then emerging from its 1996 bankruptcy filing in Indiana.

[7][8] In an October 2000 interview with The Wall Street Transcript, Randeep Grewal stated that the company's motto was "Working for Profits".

[6] As of 1999, Greka had holdings in Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, and China, in addition to oil fields and other facilities in California, Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana.

[18] On August 20, 2008, Greka settled a lawsuit brought from the trustees of the owners of the mineral rights to several leases on the Cat Canyon Field.

At issue was the transfer in 2002 of production from Vintage Petroleum, the original operator hired in 1992, to Greka, which allegedly took place without the trustee's permission.

[19] Due to the decline in oil prices during the Great Recession, Greka laid off 30 people in March 2009, representing about 20% of its staff in the Santa Maria area.

It sits on 30 acres (120,000 m2) of land surrounded by an agricultural area, but within the still-operational portion of the Santa Maria Valley oil field.

[23] The refinery was constructed in 1935, prior to the creation of zoning laws in the county, which accounts for its unusual position as an isolated industrial parcel within a mostly agricultural area.

In 2005, Greka shut the plant down temporarily in a planned 10-year turnaround to upgrade the equipment further, and in November of that year received a permit to process wastewater, which is now used to irrigate surrounding cropland.

Greka was able to capture this resource since the heavy oil existed in a shallower, neglected reservoir, primarily the contained in the Sisquoc Formation.

[6] As of the beginning of 2009, Greka ran onshore oil production facilities in four California counties: Santa Barbara, Kern, Ventura, and Orange.

In 2009, only Chevron Corporation was left of the major companies; Aera Energy LLC, a joint venture of Shell and Mobil, also retained some operations at the Cat Canyon Oil Field.

According to EPA Superfund Division employee Robert Wise, speaking to the Associated Press, "I've been in the hazardous materials business for 20 years and this is the worst oil company I've ever seen.

The EPA and the DOJ determined that Santa Maria Refining Company disposed of contaminated wastewater into wells that were not permitted for that use, posing a risk to groundwater supplies.

Attorney Robert O'Brien also emphasized that Greka is meticulous in its reporting of the exact amount spilled, unlike other operators in the county.

Greka had spilled approximately 500,000 US gallons (1,900 m3) of liquids in the county – both oil and produced water, a total of about 12,000 barrels (1,900 m3) – in the four years from 2003, when the company went private, to the end of 2007, while it also had the largest number of active wells.

As part of this initiative, it would repair or remove much of the decaying infrastructure which had been responsible for many of the leaks, spills, and releases that had brought the company to the attention of regulators and the public.

[44][47] In March 2011, Greka agreed to pay $2 million between 2011 and 2014 as compensation for the series of spills which occurred in late 2007 and early 2008, events which included more than 1,700 violations.

[55] In February 2019, the EPA ordered the company to conduct sampling to determine whether its operations resulted in contaminated local soil and groundwater.