Cat Canyon Oil Field
oil field in California, US
The Cat Canyon Oil Field is a large oil field in the Solomon Hills of central Santa Barbara County, California, about 10 miles southeast of Santa Maria. It is the largest oil field in Santa Barbara County, and as of 2010 is the 20th-largest in California by cumulative production.
The field was discovered in 1908, just seven years after the nearby Orcutt field. At first it was developed slowly, because of difficulties in drilling and keeping wells productive, but as ever-richer reservoirs were revealed in the next two decades it gradually became one of the most productive fields in the state. A mature field in decline, estimated reserves have dwindled to 2.3 million barrels, less than one percent of the total produced in the preceding century. A total of 243 wells remained active, although a field revitalization program commenced by ERG Resources in 2011 intends to extend the field's lifetime by extracting reserves previously considered unrecoverable. The largest operators currently active on the field are Greka Energy with 168 active wells, and ERG, who plans to bring over 300 shut-in wells back into production.
Geographic setting
The oil field extends from the southeastern extreme of the flat Santa Maria Valley south and southeast into the Solomon Hills. It is approximately ten miles long on the northwest to southeast axis, and four miles across at its widest point. It is divided into three major areas: East/Central, West, and Sisquoc.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5051007. Authority coordinates are 34.834, -120.304. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 1908 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cat Canyon Oil Field” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.