[Editor’s Note: In advance of tonight’s 7 o’clock City Council meeting in Council Chambers on fracking, recent Council candidate Mr. Murray forwarded this “clarification” to the Council members.]
Council members:
I would like to clarify a few things about the size, proximity and amount of planned activity for the Culver City portion of the Baldwin Hills Oil Field. This is data derived from the Baldwin Hills Community Standards District Environmental Impact Report.
Only 10 percent of the oilfield’s surface is in Culver City, but Culver City sits on more than 20 percent of the underground portion of the oil field. The field's boundary is defined by the state’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources, separate of the CSD.
The oil field lies under our streets, and it stretches between City Hall, north to Venice and west past the Senior Center. (See the map.)
PXP had released plans to do slant drilling under Ballona Creek and into the Downtown neighborhoods in 2009, but this was subsequently put on hold due to the EIR.
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In addition, the number of wells planned for the Culver City section is not trivial. The operator has planned 100 wells over the next 20 years, including both production and injection wells.
This is a subset of table 3.1 in the EIR:
Year:
2008 0
2009 0
2010 1
2011 13
2012 14
2013 18
2014 9
2015 8
2016 3
2017 3
2018 3
2019 3
2020 3
2021 3
2022 3
2023 3
2024 3
2025 3
2026 3
2027 2
2028 2
Total 100
I hope this shows that it is still useful to effect a ban in only the Culver City portion of the field.
Mr. Murray may be contacted at stephen@sunstruction.com
