Talk:Elk Hills Oil Field

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A fact from Elk Hills Oil Field appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 9 March 2008.

The figures given for oil reserves are contradictory. The introductory graph has it right: about 107 million barrels. The figures in the last two graphs of the production and political history section are wildly wrong. Bechtel in no way ever pumped 42 BILLION barrels of oil from the field - that is a figure about twice the entire existing oil reserves in the U.S. Nor is the number said to be Occidental's anywhere near correct - 484 billion barrels? Please. That's more than one-third of the reserves on the entire planet - we'd be sitting pretty if that were true (though we'd still be killing our environment). Whoever wrote that section has a problem with zeroes. It doesn't help that the state of California's table of reserves entitles the column Mbbls and then says Elk Hills has 106,554 Mbbls. What the heck does that mean? I think Mbbls does not mean millions of barrels but thousands of barrels, and why the state statisticians couldn't have made that clear is beyond me. But thousands of barrels makes the number fit that in the introductory graph, and 106 million barrels equals the 6.7 billion cubic meters cited; and the Occidental figure needs to have three zeroes taken off to for it to make any sense at all - it is conceivable that Occidental thinks Elk Hills reserves total 484 MILLION barrels. I'm making those corrections - I'm sure about the state figures, but not about Occidental's, except that I'm sure that number is very wrong, so I'll just delete the three zeroes.Wlegro (talk) 00:30, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Occidental claims 484 million. It's in the cite, at least it was when I wrote the article. It was another editor that changed it to billion. Thanks for fixing it, Antandrus (talk) 00:53, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Wow. Somebody read something I wrote. And fast, too. That'll teach me to open my big mouth and make assumptions. (Well, no it won't - it's been tried repeatedly with no success.) Apologies. I wonder how it is that someone would come in and change those figures - maybe they looked at Mbbls and thought, "hey, whoever wrote this section has a problem with zeroes!" Reminds me of myself. Thanks for writing the article - I got into it looking for a figure for the vaunted oil reserves of the North Slope of Alaska - I keep seeing the need for drilling there touted, and have read the amount of oil there wouldn't last us very long; and when I found that number, I went looking for oil reserves in California, and I found it right away, thanks to you (I'm still interested in finding the numbers for each state). Good work. You're one of the reasons I look things up in Wikipedia dozens of times a day. In fact, I just looked up your name, and wouldn't you know, there it is...something else I'd never heard of. Given its obscurity, I'm guessing you liked the look and sound of the name. I do, too. Now I have to look up every proper name in the first sentence of that entry from Adramyttian Gulf to Mytilene. Wikipedia takes up a lot of my time...my wife says it keeps me out of trouble. If she only knew...Wlegro (talk) 06:27, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

No problem, and thanks for mentioning it; I had always thought those people adding unit conversions used an automated tool. Now I know better and will have to check all the other oil field articles I wrote for accuracy (Midway-Sunset, South Belridge Oil Field, Kern River Oil Field, etc.) -- for all I know they all increased their reserve size by three orders of magnitude. If only, LOL. And you're right -- I just liked the look and sound and obscurity of the name ... Antandrus (talk) 13:57, 19 May 2008 (UTC)