Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence

4. Los Angeles, the Energy Capital of Southern California

77 Sarah S. Elkind Los Angeles, the Energy Capital of Southern California 4 Los Angeles has some competition for the title of Energy Capital of Southern California. Southern Kern County saw oil development before Los Angeles did; oil companies pioneered offshore oil drilling in Santa Barbara County. Opposition to oil drilling, too, is more associated with Santa Barbara than Los Angeles because of the massive 1969 blowout in Santa Barbara Channel, which many historians credit with energizing the 1970s environmental movement, at least in California. Cases could be made, too, for naming Hoover Dam, or perhaps the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, as California energy capitals because of the controversies that surrounded their construction, and their importance in California’s electricity grid. Nonetheless, I think Los Angeles will do as an energy capital. Oil profoundly shaped the landscape, economy, and culture of the region. The inherent conflicts that arose because of the presence of oil deposits under residential sections of the city, the early adoption of zoning, a wildly speculative real estate market , LA’s carefully constructed image as a bucolic respite from the dirty, industrial East, and the relationships between oil production and consumption in the quintessential automobile city raise a number of issues central to the history of energy development and its impacts on cities and society. 78 Sarah S. Elkind History of Oil in Los Angeles Los Angeles and coastal Orange County remain important areas of oil production , refining, and transportation today. The region boasts a third of California’s refineries; the Los Angeles and Long Beach Harbors host a fifth of the state’s petroleum terminals. Additional oil fields, refineries, and processing facilities are located north of Los Angeles in Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Kern Counties.1 All of this began with oil prospecting in the wake of geological surveys of California in the 1860s, which were in turn fueled by the invention of processes that distilled kerosene, a lamp fuel, from asphalt or crude oil. Kerosene production in California began before this period with raw materials imported from the East Coast. But oil seeped from the ground in many places in California. Railroad surveys of the 1850s noted oil and gas seeps from the Central Coast of California south to Los Angeles.2 The most famous of these seeps is the La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles; in fact, tar still oozes onto walkways in the park, site of both the George C. Page Museum that houses the paleontological finds from the La Brea tar pits, and the Los Angeles County Art Museums. In 1859, two of San Francisco’s kerosene merchants moved south to produce kerosene from the La Brea tar pits and from bitumen deposits in Carpenteria, north of Los Angeles. These ventures lost money and lasted only a few years.3 Other early oil ventures were even more speculative; drilling firms incorporated to acquire water rights, deal in real estate, and to “improve, develop and cultivate lands whether for mineral or agricultural” purposes.4 This first oil boom also soon faded, in part because California’s heavy crudes were not well suited to kerosene production. Thus, Edward Doheny’s subsequent “discovery” of oil in Los Angeles hardly amounted to a surprise. Los Angeles’s oil boom began a little later, in 1892, when Doheny drilled a shallow, but productive well about a mile from city hall, near the La Brea tar pits. Within a decade of Doheny’s initial success, over a thousand other wells had sprung up in and near downtown Los Angeles.5 In 1911, Standard Oil laid pipelines from the downtown Los Angeles oil field to the coast, built its second California oil refinery, and founded the city of El Segundo.6 Other oil refineries soon followed, eventually making Los Angeles a center for oil processing as well as extraction. Back in the oil fields, however, the oil rush sparked by Doheny’s find seemed to play out quickly. Then, between 1917 and 1926, prospectors found extraordinarily rich oil deposits dotted elsewhere around the Los Angeles basin. Just three of these—Huntington Beach, Signal Hill, and Santa Fe Springs—produced more than three quarters of California’s total oil output. These new oil fields swamped the market, causing oil prices to drop by two-thirds in eighteen months.7 Residential land development created a host of unusual problems in these new oil fields. Much of Huntington Beach, Signal Hill, Long Beach, Venice, and Playa [3.144.12...