The Lost Hills oil field owes much of its production today to hydraulic fracturing. Photos by Andrew Alden

"Fracking," the ugly nickname for a common oilfield practice, is a rising concern in many places. What about California? Appropriately for a high-tech state, all kinds of advances in underground techniques have been used here. How safe are they? Hard to say.

Working with underground spaces means entering a dynamic environment. California oilfield operators learned that very early in ways that would horrify us today. A century ago, drillers would sometimes tap a highly overpressured oil pool and cause a gusher. The worst of these was the Lakeview gusher, a blowout that began in the spring of 1910 between Taft and Maricopa and lasted more than a year. (The scene today is marked by a plaque.) It ruined the California oil industry for a while—not because of environmental degradation or public revulsion or a government crackdown, but because the flood of oil made the price of crude collapse. Let me put it this way: the problems we have today from oilwell technologies aren't like they used to be.

Site of the Lakeview gusher north of Maricopa. A hundred years later, the ground is still paved with asphalt.

Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) is a way to open up deep rocks by pumping liquids down a borehole at high pressure. The idea is to make a lot of little cracks in tight rocks so the trapped oil can flow out. In the old days, well operators in the Los Angeles basin would goose a fading well by pumping down the crude oil already in the borehole. Today fracking involves water mixed with a little sand, which washes into the new cracks and jams them open. It's widely performed in California to keep old oilfields producing.

You have to pump the fracking water back out before you can extract the oil. Most of the time you can pump it down somewhere else to backfill the space that used to hold the oil, a technique called water injection. The industry learned that about 50 years ago when sinking ground caused shallow earthquakes. The huge Wilmington oil field under Long Beach had six damaging earthquakes between 1947 and 1961 before water injection made them stop.

Today oilfield earthquakes are not a problem in California. Disposal of excess fracking water is our dirty secret. Fracking water gets tainted from its exposure to the oil and natural brines down there, plus it's also mixed with various ingredients to help with the downhole chemistry. Water injection takes care of a lot of dirty fracking water, but the rest needs to be dealt with somehow. In the old days it was dumped on the ground or poured into ponds to evaporate, without much care. Today . . . well, nobody has been keeping track of the industry.

The state government's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) claims to be regulating fracking, but when the state Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water inquired early last year, the agency had no data to supply. This was a year after DOGGR had gotten extra money, money it had asked for, to develop fracking regulations. The agency now says on its website that it "only has limited information about the use of the practice."

The Environmental Working Group recently compiled what it could find on California fracking and DOGGR's role in overseeing it and issued a critical report called "California Regulators: See No Fracking, Speak No Fracking." The title makes its message clear, and even though I am allergic to activist overstatement of all kinds, I found its factual contents worth heeding. Now the state legislature is considering several bills to encourage more disclosure of fracking; one of them, SB 1054, would require neighboring property owners to be notified of fracking 30 days in advance. The issue is alive, and the legislative sumo match is underway. But the people's watchdog is sitting it out, leaving the fray to lawmakers and lobbyists.

Cattle range in the Big Blue Hills just a few miles from the Harris Ranch feedlot. Photos by Andrew Alden

Driving Interstate 5 through the Central Valley, I find something to like on every mile except one: the smelly vicinity of the Harris Ranch feedlot north of Coalinga. This is how you can avoid it and enjoy some geology for an hour or so.

Assuming you're heading south, the key is to get off of I-5 about 10 miles before the feedlot, at the Route 33 North/Derrick Avenue exit. Think of Derrick as old Route 33, because 33 actually joins I-5 here for a few miles before exiting to the right and meeting Derrick again farther south. See if that makes sense on the geologic map below. This side trip follows 33 into Coalinga and then straight east to the interstate, crossing some interesting structure and a couple of oil fields.

Significant map units from oldest to youngest: Ku, upper Cretaceous marine rocks; Ep, Paleocene marine rocks; E, Eocene marine rocks; M and Mc, Miocene rocks; P; Pliocene rocks; QPc, Pliocene-Pleistocene nonmarine rocks; Q, modern and recent sediment; Qoa, Quaternary river terraces. Magenta lines mark structural arches and troughs, with arrows indicating dips of adjoining strata and plunge of the feature's axis

Derrick Avenue runs for a while through orchard lands parallel to I-5, crossing it twice. Hang in there: it eventually veers away into the Big Blue Hills, as these foothills of the Coast Range are called, out of earshot of the big freeway and smellshot of the big feedlot.

The country here is rolling semidesert, marginal rangeland. The ground underfoot was muddly seafloor for many millions of years, until quite recently in geologic time, around 5 million years ago. Then slow compression across the San Andreas fault raised the Coast Range, buckling these sediments into arching folds. The upward-buckling folds are called anticlines, scientific Latin that means "sloping apart." (Downward-warping troughs, like the one running the length of the Central Valley's western edge, are called synclines.)

Erosion then got to work on the anticlines, peeling away their youngest layers and exposing progressively older rocks. Meanwhile underground, oil and gas worked their way uphill in the newly tilted strata to collect along the center of the nearest anticline. The area around Coalinga, including this part of the Big Blue Hills, is the northern edge of the California oil patch. Now maybe Derrick Avenue's name makes more sense.

Derrick Avenue meets Route 33 again, and you'll turn right on it—going left takes you straight to the stinky feedlot. The road then crosses Anticline Ridge and the heart of the Coalinga Oil Field. Take the Shell Road turnoff if you like where Route 198 comes in; both ways lead to town.

Wells of the Coalinga Oil Field. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The Coalinga field is the largest of several around here. It was the first great oil district in the Central Valley and remains productive today using enhanced recovery techniques.

Courtesy California Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources

The oil-bearing hills give way to Pleasant Valley, a syncline filled with young sediment that's occupied by farmland, a state prison, and the town of Coalinga. There are places in town to take a break and find a snack, not to mention the local attraction the R. C. Baker Memorial Museum. Then follow Route 33 out of town again.

It's possible to make Coalinga the start of an extended trip through the oil patch—just follow Route 33 south where it turns right. But to end this side trip, stay on the straightaway, crossing the anticline one last time in the low Guijarral Hills and its moribund oil field to reach the freeway, which is already in progress.

Wikipedia calls this the last working pump in the Guijarral Hills Oil Field. Wikimedia Commons photo

Also still in progress is the rise of the Coast Range. On the afternoon of 2 May 1983, Anticline Ridge jolted up another foot or so in a magnitude 6.4 earthquake. I was sitting in Menlo Park at the time and remember well its ominous slow roll, the sign of a big one somewhere far away.

Emma Valdez, a Sapphire Energy technician, holds a petri dish with 1 million algae cells. Algae is grown and scaled up to 20-liter containers in about one week.

With more and more cars on roadways worldwide – and fossil fuel supplies running low, can renewable fuels really replace crude oil?

In Nebraska, the alternative of choice is ethanol because corn is the mainstay of our economy.  But corn, along with many other crops, takes lots of land…and huge amounts of water.  As important as it is to Nebraska, ethanol, at best, is a 10% additive, not a future fuel in its own right.

So what’s a real alternative?  Research shows one promising alternative seems the least obvious – algae (see QUEST Nebraska: Algae for Fuel).

Algae is a microscopic plant-like marine organism.  There are billions of them in our world, and they exist all around us.  Algae are found in ponds, lakes, streams – all types of bodies of water…even in your bathtub if it’s not cleaned regularly.

It’s green and a bit slimy to the touch.  For the most part, we avoid contact with algae – but it just may be the key to our energy future.  How’s that?  Companies like Sapphire Energy in San Diego, CA are working with universities, including the University of Nebraska to make microscopic algae into the fuel for the future.

Algae conjures up thoughts about Soylent Green, the 1973 sci-fi movie thriller that depicts human survival dependent upon on a green food ration made of “high protein plankton.”  Algae are a type of plankton.

SPOILER ALERT:  Do not read the next sentence if you’ve never seen this movie.   

But there was more to the content of Soylent Green.  Charlton Heston solves the riddle with a horrific warning:  Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Remember when I said algae are slimy?  There’s a reason for that.  If Charlton Heston was warning us, he’d exclaim: Algae is OIL!  Not exactly – but oil we use for our fuel today is actually made from ancient, ancient algae.

“Each algae contains up to 50% oil,” says University of Nebraska-Lincoln biologist George Oyler.  Over millions of years, billions of algae die, collect, and over time are chemically altered through pressure and heat that converts algae oil into “crude oil” which we seek and drill for to energize our world.  Finding a way to convert algae into oil faster than nature would create an almost endless supply of oil.  “We want to accelerate that process into a single year.” 

In 2009, a QUEST video Algae Power, surveyed algae biofuel as a grand experiment, “not ready for prime time.”  The problem was scaling up to industrial production.  Now, Sapphire Energy is leading the way towards industrial production.  It’s no longer a survey experiment.

The process begins as Sapphire technician Emma Valdez swipes a metal loop over an algae filled petri plate (culture dish) and transfers cells to a new plate. “Algae is one of the fastest growing plant on the planet.  This plate contains millions of algae cells.  I can take this plate and make multiple copies.”  Pointing to a stack of petri dishes, she explains that these plates are added to water to make a dense culture, giving rise to 20-liter glass carboy containers.  “I can grow this to scale in a little over a week.”

The carboy containers are then added to long oval test pools in a greenhouse, creating larger concentrations of promising algae species.

Growing algae outdoors is a huge challenge.  But that’s exactly Sapphire’s goal – creating algae farms.  But algae is a wild plant.  “No one’s taken a wild plant and just grown it to scale,” says Mike Mendez, Sapphire’s former VP of Technology (now a research professor at UC-San Diego).  “Algae isn’t an industry.  It’s a commodity, like corn.  We have to think like a farmer and grow algae as a crop.” 

But plants like corn haven’t become crops overnight.  Mendez says, “It took 7,000 years to get corn where it is today.  I’m gonna have to do whatever it takes to speed up the process.”  Sapphire wants to plant, harvest and process algae oil in real time.

Algae ponds at Sapphire Energy's test farm in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

So, Sapphire has created a 20-acre aquatic test farm in arid Las Cruces, New Mexico.  Why here?  New Mexico has an abundance of sunlight and a rich supply of salt water beneath the dry sands that can’t be used for farming or drinking, but is perfect for growing algae.  Nonetheless, the algae has to survive stress, disease, summer heat and winter freeze.  For two years, scientists and technicians have been successful in scaling up algae from the carboys to 40-foot, then 100-foot, and finally 300-foot oval ponds.

Once the algae mature in the ponds, it’s sent to an industrial centrifuge that separates the algae from the water, creating a thick algae paste. That paste is fed into a test pilot extractor that uses eco-friendly solvents to crack open the algae cells and release oil – green crude.

Sapphire will soon open a 300-acre in 2012.  It will be the largest algae biofuel test plant in the nation.  They expect to produce 1 million gallons of algae biofuel per year – an industry record.  Once Sapphire can create even larger quantities of green crude, they believe the cost of creating an algae fuel will begin approaching the cost of oil.  Stay tuned to see if their plan creates a viable renewable fuel for our future.

Oil wells creak in the Bakersfield twilight. Petroleum is not confined to Southern California and Central Valley; we have it in the Bay Area too. Photo by Andrew Alden.

Norma Desmond, the washed-up movie star of Sunset Boulevard, had some memorable lines. One of them was, "I've got oil wells in Bakersfield, pumping pumping pumping." We think of our petroleum as a Southern California thing, or at least no closer than the Great Valley. But petroleum—oil and gas, or both—is widespread around the state, including the Bay Area.

It wasn't just gold, water and agricultural soils that made California rich. Petroleum is one of our greatest natural assets, and the state still ranks fourth in oil production behind Louisiana, Texas and Alaska. While the forests of derricks that once dotted Los Angeles are now subdued and disguised, the Central Valley is still a proud petroleum region, with gas fields in the Sacramento Valley and oil fields in the San Joaquin Valley.

The oil and gas fields of the Central Valley intrude into the Bay Area from the Delta as far as Concord and the Suisun Bay to its north. Gas was produced from the hills north of Concord in the 1960s, and today the old Los Medanos gas field is used by PG&E for storage.

Photo (c) 2007 Andrew Alden

Before petroleum exploration became high-tech, the best way to find oil and gas was to look for natural seeps. An oily sheen on a stream, trickles of tar from a sunny sea cliff, and persistent odors like kerosene are typical signs. These are more common than most people think. Much rarer are actual tar flows like those at Carpinteria Beach near Santa Barbara.

Photo (c) 2010 Andrew Alden

Oil seeps were discovered near Half Moon Bay and in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the 1800s. Asphalt and tar sand were mined from these areas for the streets of San Francisco.

Natural asphalt from the McKittrick tar seep. Photo by Andrew Alden

Later, conventional exploration opened up four districts of producing wells in the San Mateo Peninsula: the Half Moon Bay, La Honda and Oil Creek fields still yield oil today. The Moody Gulch field, which started as a tar pit in 1878, was shut down in 1960 and is now under Route 17.

Photo by Les Magoon, U.S. Geological Survey

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, oil and gas have been produced in Petaluma, Pinole and Livermore. Oil was reported in the Caldecott Tunnel excavations, which is to be expected as the tunnel penetrates our local piece of the Monterey Formation, a petroleum source rock of great extent.

Oil and gas are called fossil fuels, but maybe a better concept is that they are geological compost. They are the bodies of dead plankton, trapped in the mud with no oxygen to consume them. Instead their living substance breaks down and is transformed into simpler hydrocarbon compounds.

The simplest and lightest of these is methane, and that's refined and sold to us as "natural gas." But actual natural gas, the stuff bubbling up in tar pits, is a mixture of compounds. It won't smell like the gas in your stove—that smell is the odorant butyl mercaptan. It's more like the smell of crude oil—a tantalizing, sweeter version of your local gas station. If you don't know how crude oil smells, take a side trip to the oil fields on your way south, like this one just off Interstate 5 at Lost Hills.

Lost Hills oil field. Photo (c) 2010 Andrew Alden

The U.S. Geological Survey has a wealth of material on California's oil and gas seeps at walrus.wr.usgs.gov/seeps.

It could have been many things that caused the greatest oil spill ever.

My first response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was, "Some engineer screwed up!" After some thought I realized this may not be true. If someone designed a system to stop the flow of oil in an emergency, said it would work under the conditions a mile below the surface of the Gulf, and then the failsafe system failed, that person is in big trouble. But it could have been many things that caused the greatest oil spill ever. It could be that the equipment wasn’t designed to work under a mile of water, or that the correct procedure for shutting down the flow of oil was not followed, or it could be that warnings that an emergency was likely to happen that would put the entire Gulf ecosystem and the livelihoods of thousands of people were ignored for the sake of getting the job done on schedule and saving BP money. Eventually, I expect the truth will come out.

One of my lab mates while I was studying bioengineering at Penn State had spent some time just out of college working for a defense contractor on the nosecone of the MX missile, a nuclear weapons delivery system. His job was to help figure out how to trigger the nuclear warhead before the missile, going at supersonic speeds, was crushed upon hitting the ground. He said it was a very interesting engineering project, and that he didn’t think about what the device was designed to do. When he did, after a year or so on the project, he decided he couldn’t live with himself if something he worked on were ever used to cause mass destruction. So he switched gears and began studying to do medical research.

On the other hand, one of my classmates at Notre Dame, a metallurgist, has been working for a defense contractor for almost thirty years. I haven’t spoken with him recently, but I imagine he feels okay about his work, and has decided that any use of weapons he helped design or build would be justified and necessary for the defense of the country.

Which one of my classmates is right? I imagine they both are, as long as they think seriously about what they are doing, assent to it, and take responsibility for the work of their hands. Engineers at BP are no different than the other professionals in the company—the accountants, CEOs, marketing people, executive assistants. They all have influence on outcomes. It’s easy to blame the people who handle the money—think Wall Street—but it’s usually not that simple.

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The Rice Solar Energy Project will produce enough electricity to meet the demand of 60,000 households—about 150 megawatts—beginning in 2013. Click here for a full-size version of the diagram. Courtesy of SolarReserve.

In a world energy landscape dominated by coal, gas, oil, and nuclear, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar don’t stand a chance if we can’t find a way to store energy when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. In my last blog entry, I wrote about storing electric energy in a battery made of paper and nanotech ink (see The Paper Battery Chase). But it isn’t necessary to store electric energy. We can create hydrogen, using electricity generated from photovoltaic panels, and then use the hydrogen to fuel a fuel cell, which recreates the electricity. The Leaf Community in Italy is experimenting with this process. And energy changes forms in other ways. We can store heat from the sun and use it to create electricity in the dark. As in any energy storage and conversion process, if we can do it without losing too much energy in the process, we can add another tool to our renewable energy toolbox.

I add a little salt to the water when cooking spaghetti—it raises the boiling point so that you can cook the pasta more quickly, although I’m not sure it makes a big difference. Mostly I add salt to make the spaghetti taste better. The properties of a liquid salt—a mixture of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate—are a little different. This liquid salt will store heat up to a temperature of 1,000⁰F, which is much higher than the boiling point of water, 212⁰F at sea level. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company, (PG&E) has contracted with SolarReserve LLC to store energy using liquid salt. The Rice Solar Energy Project will produce enough electricity to meet the demand of 60,000 households—about 150 megawatts—beginning in 2013.

The Rice Project uses a large circular field of mirrors to reflect light onto a central tower. Liquid salt is circulated through the tower and, once heated, it is stored in an insulated tank. When the sun goes down the liquid salt will still be able to heat water well past the boiling point to create steam, which can be fed into a conventional steam turbine to produce—Walla—electricity. The liquid salt, now cooled, is stored in another tank and is ready to begin the process all over again.

Take that coal, gas, oil, and nuclear!

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This 1928 home in Albemarle County, Virginia recently
underwent a renovation through the EarthCraft Virginia
existing homes renovation program. After the renovation,
electricity use dropped by 24% and energy costs dropped
by 42%.

Home Energy Magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special May/June issue. We're taking the opportunity to look back at the past several decades of energy policy in America, and look ahead to what may come. Here's a sneak preview of some of what we're thinking.

Alan Meier, Senior Executive Editor, and Steve Greenberg, Technical Editor, among others, lived through the first energy crisis precipitated by the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and its aftermath. They remember the sudden interest in energy efficiency and renewable energy; the proliferation of solar water heaters on the roofs of homes that broke down quickly, had no one trained to fix them, and have become rusted monuments to the best of intentions gone wrong; the sudden and short lived gain in the average car’s fuel efficiency. They also recall some major successes: the huge and lasting increase in appliance efficiency, especially refrigerators; the success of the Energy Star program; and California’s progressive Title 24 building standards.

Alan, in a yet-to-be-published editorial, has been musing on what will happen after the billions of dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) have been spent on building and retrofitting more efficient and sustainable buildings. Will it be the same three steps forward, two steps back pattern that we’ve seen before? Not so, according to Alan, if we:

Steve came up with some powerful images to stimulate our thinking about the future of energy efficiency:

We've been on a ramp with a rather gradual (and usually upward, with notable exceptions) slope. Suddenly the ramp gets so steep it looks like a wall. If we make it to the new, much higher level, what does the terrain look like? Do we go off a cliff, completing a boom and bust cycle the likes of which we've never seen? Or is there a reasonable ramp down to a sustainable level?

I lived through the lines for gasoline, though I couldn’t yet drive. I've observed the resulting interest in miles per gallon instead of horsepower; the return to a horsepower-mentality; and the recent switch back to a concern about miles per gallon. My family had a great experience with our new-fangled heat pump in the early 70s. My Dad, an engineer and all-around handy man, first got me interested in how houses and cars work during that time. I guess I vote for a steep, but not impossible ramp up in efficiency, followed by a less intense, slow and gradual climb that continues for a long time, with sudden jumps due to new, undreamed of (or only just dreamed of) technology. The pressure will come from high energy prices and people starting to feel the real effects of global warming and unhealthy air. I don't think these things will change anytime soon.

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Areas where the oil spread after the spill. See this map and others.

And November's the month last year when the Cosco Busan crashed, leaking 53,000 gallons of black goo into San Francisco Bay.

So biologists will be particularly attentive this November, one year after the oil spill, to see if there's a noticeable dip in the numbers of herring in the Bay, or the number of migratory birds that alight here.

The number of birds harmed by the oil spill is not really known. More than 2,000 birds were killed – but those are simply the birds that were identified, not the total number. Since many dead birds in remote areas were never found, and since predators took away many of the hurt birds, the estimate for the total number of birds harmed by the spill is many times higher than that. So researchers are conducting experiments to determine a provable, scientific estimate of the number of birds killed or harmed by the oil spill.

According to California Fish and Game scientist Julie Yamomoto, it only takes a spot of oil the size of a nickel to harm a bird. It's not just uncomfortable, she says, it's actually lethal – because the oil is like a hole in a wetsuit, and birds that have been oiled become hypothermic. And they also lose buoyancy, so birds can actually sink and drown in the ocean.

All the experiments and data on habitats, fish, birds and other wildlife will be compiled into something called the Natural Resource Damage Assessment.

It's nicknamed NRDA (pronounced "nerd-a") and that's pretty apt. It's a little wonky, to say the least. The data is supposed to be completed by the end of next year, and then the NRDA report is expected to be compiled and submitted sometime in 2010.

Listen to the Oil Spill Anniversary radio report online.

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You may listen to the "Chevron's Plans" Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.