Kettleman North Dome Oil Field

[2] The Kettleman Hills is named, and misspelled, after Dave Kettelman, a pioneer sheep and cattle rancher who grazed his animals there in the 1860s.

[3] The hills, which rise to an elevation of approximately 1,200 feet (370 m), divide the San Joaquin Valley on the east from the much smaller Kettleman Plain to the west.

Underneath the Temblor is yet another series of impermeable and permeable strata, like layers of a cake: the Vaqueros Sandstone and Kreyenhagen Formation are impermeable units beneath the Temblor; underneath them, another large pool of oil is found in the Upper McAdams Formation (of Eocene age) at a depth of around 10,000 feet (3,000 m).

[6] The presence of a large oil field was long suspected in the Kettleman Hills region, since it is an anticlinal structure like so many of the nearby San Joaquin Valley oil fields; however, early test wells found nothing, since drilling methods then lacked the ability to reach the 7,000 feet (2,100 m) necessary to tap the reservoirs.

1 well: after 19 months of labor, in October 1928, at a depth of 7,108 feet (2,167 m), oil was found, and a terrific blowout ensued, which took three years to bring under control.

1 and other wells in the huge Temblor pool produced 3,670 barrels a day during that period; the initial measured pressure was 3,540 psi (24,400 kPa).

Other states, such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, restricted production of oil through agreements with each other, in order to keep the price from falling too far; however, in California no such regulation existed.

[1] Unlike many of the other major California oil fields, enhanced recovery methods have been used minimally at Kettleman Hills.

Boom Town, a 1940 film about wildcatting in the early Oklahoma oil industry, starred Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy.