Midway-Sunset Oil Field

State Route 33 runs along the axis of the Midway-Sunset for much of its length, and the towns of Taft, Maricopa, and Fellows are built directly on the oil field.

Throughout the field, the Tulare is often the capping impermeable formation, underneath which oil collects, but in some areas it is a productive unit in its own right.

Other operators on the field included large firms such as Occidental Petroleum and Plains Exploration & Production, as well as numerous independents, such as Holmes Western Oil Corporation, Berry Petroleum, E&B Natural Resources, Crimson Resource Management.

[5] A traveler along State Route 33 between Maricopa and McKittrick will see hundreds of pumpjacks, the relatively small proportion of the oil wells that are visible from the highway.

Since the oil is heavy, and does not flow freely, it can be assisted by thermal methods, which include steamflooding, cyclic steam, and fire flooding.

As the Midway-Sunset field has a large amount of heavy oil requiring steam to allow its recovery, many of the field operators have built cogeneration plants to both sell power to the electric grid and create steam for their operations.

This kind of power plant burns natural gas, abundantly available on site, and converts the energy into both electricity and steam used to flood the heavy oil reservoir in the field itself.

One of the largest of these, a 225-megawatt facility, was built by the Sun Cogeneration Company and a subsidiary of Southern California Edison on the western boundary of the field, along Crocker Springs Road.

A construction permit was approved in 1987 and the plant began operation two years later; it is now known as the Midway-Sunset Cogeneration Company.

[12] The estimated ultimate size of the Midway-Sunset oilfield resource has been repeatedly raised during its more than 120 years of production.