Lost Hills Oil Field

In 1998, one of the field's gas wells was the site of a spectacular blowout, producing a pillar of fire which burned for 14 days and was visible more than 40 miles (64 km) away.

The climate in the Lost Hills area is arid to semi-arid, with an average rainfall of 5 to 6 inches (130 to 150 mm) a year, almost all in the winter months.

These anticlines run closely parallel to the San Andreas Fault to the west, and formed as a result of compression from tectonic movement.

[6] A peculiarity of the Lost Hills operations is the pronounced subsidence of the ground surface as it collapses into the area vacated by the petroleum after being pumped out.

Waterflooding – the practice of filling the reservoir with water to push petroleum to recovery wells, and thereby also reoccupying the space vacated by oil and gas – has partially mitigated the problem.

They were drilling a water well for livestock grazing; instead of finding groundwater, however, they struck oil, specifically the Etchegoin Pool at a depth of 530 feet (160 m).

On the evening of November 23, a wildcat well being drilled into a promising anticlinal fold underneath the Monterey Formation, northeast of the main Lost Hills field, reached the depth of 17,000 feet (5,200 m) and hit a previously untapped reservoir of gas under intense pressure.

This enormous pillar of fire, which rose to 340 feet (100 m) into the sky, could be seen more than 40 miles (64 km) away, and the quantity of oil release was estimated at 2,000 barrels (320 m3) of oil per day and gas bursting from the well has been estimated at 80 million cubic feet (2.3 million cubic metres) per day at standard conditions.