The Kern River Oil Discovery of Eighteen Ninety-Nine

In the summer of eighteen ninety-nine, wildcatters on the north bank of the Kern River struck oil at a shallow depth, and the strike astonished drillers and investors who had been skeptical that this corner of Kern County had anything worth boring into.

Within months, the Kern River Oil Field had attracted wildcatters from across California and from the established Pennsylvania oil fields on the other coast. The field ran roughly ten miles northeast of downtown Bakersfield, along the river bluffs that rise from the valley floor. By nineteen oh two, there were over twelve hundred wells in operation. The Kern River field became, in its first years, one of the most productive oil fields in California history, which at the time meant one of the most productive in the world.

The production did not last at those rates. The field's pressure was relatively low, and the oil was heavy and thick, a grade that required more energy to move than the lighter crudes being found elsewhere. By the nineteen teens, production had dropped significantly from its early peak. The field appeared to be declining toward exhaustion.

Then, in the nineteen sixties, Chevron and other operators began experimenting with steam injection. The technique works by pumping high-pressure steam into the formation, heating the heavy crude until it flows easily enough to be pumped out. It was not new technology, but the application at Kern River was unusually successful. Steam injection revived the field. By the nineteen seventies and eighties, the Kern River Oil Field was producing more oil than it had at any point in its history, including its original boom. The steam injection operations you may see from the road, the equipment that looks like industrial laundry and smells of sulfur, are the visible signature of a technique that gave a dying field more than a second life.

The Kern River Oil Field has produced more than two billion barrels of oil since eighteen ninety-nine. By most estimates, a significant portion of what remains in the formation is still recoverable. The field that came in more than a hundred and twenty years ago is still operating, still steaming, still pumping heavy crude out of the Kern River bluffs north of the city that grew up around it.