Dirty Money

I thought by leaving Texas I had escaped the oil industry. Au contraire. "Parts per Million" only makes a passing reference to an oil well next to the Beverly Center, so I did some googling and found this: http://explorer.altopix.com/map/4rf5zl/Beverly_Center_Mall.htm

I also came across an article called "Tracking Tar" in Orion Magazine (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/93/) that informed me that the lovely Farmer's Market where I buy my organic fruit is also the sight of several wells:

Washburn, who estimated that there were probably more than a hundred oil companies presently pumping in LA, told me of one local operation that consisted of a ninety-year-old woman who owned a couple of wells in her backyard that she had inherited from her husband, and which she still operated single-handedly.

“All the big companies are mostly out[side] of LA now, consolidating their operations,” Washburn told me. “The last significant onshore drilling in the basin around where you live was done in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Beverly Hills field was being drilled then. The Salt Lake field, like others, was consolidated, most of the derricks taken down. What you do now is slant drilling from an existing well off at an angle to tap into new, usually deeper oil-bearing strata. That Farmers Market site has twenty wells operating there. It’s not got a lot of oil left, maybe twenty or thirty years’ worth, depending on the price.”

I was amazed at this, having walked nonchalantly through the gate at the Farmers Market site a couple of weeks before when driving around to locate wells near Park La Brea. I’d counted what I thought were a maximum of six wells, just humps of yellow pipes and valves set relatively low to the ground, before sticking my head in the manager’s office and starting to ask questions. I had startled the two men inside, who obviously weren’t expecting visitors and who politely but firmly noted I was trespassing and that I should contact the corporate offices if I had any questions. They gave me the phone number that led me to Washburn and his geologist, watched carefully as I left, then closed and locked the gate behind me. Another well-hunting trip the same week had led me to the Beverly Center, the behemoth mall located about a mile west of the La Brea Tar Pits. At the parking entrance facing Beverly Hills sat an active drilling rig, the only oil well I know of at a shopping mall.

And this:

In Los Angeles, petroleum is a widespread fact of nature underfoot, one of the primary reasons for the city’s existence, and the fuel that both allowed and necessitated the creation of a grid large enough to cover the basin, therefore determining the warp and weft of its urban fabric. Ironically, during the latter half of the last century as we assiduously cultivated environmental awareness, we mostly lost sight of oil in LA. The energy companies quite understandably did everything they could to camouflage their activities, reacting to our growing disdain for visible signs of industrial activity. Derricks were dismantled or covered up to resemble buildings—like the Breitburn rig on Pico and Genesse, which is camouflaged as an office building—and landscaping was installed around pumps to screen them from view.

And more relating to my neighborhood:

Petroleum, its byproducts, and associated elements are virtually omnipresent across the Los Angeles Basin, which even a glance at the map hanging in Hal Washburn’s office makes obvious. Natural gas, composed mostly of methane and ethane, is extremely flammable when not dispersed. At several points along my street in Park La Brea, white plastic pipes rise from the ground, climb up the two-story townhouses, and vent “wild” methane away from kitchen windows—ironic considering how much we pay for the “tame,” which is to say metered, gas we use in our stoves.

Methane is not something you want to spend much time breathing. Although it’s not rated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a particularly hazardous toxin—apart from its extreme flammability—when combined with steam it yields carbon monoxide that in sufficient concentrations can suffocate you. Its toxicity is benign, however, when compared to hydrogen sulfide, which often accompanies natural gas and occurs naturally around oil fields. Also a product of organic decomposition, it gives off the classic “rotten egg” odor we associate with swamps, marshes, and the northwest corner of Hancock Park. If the stoplight at the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Sixth Street is red, the odor accumulates quickly enough in the car to make you roll up the windows and switch the fan to recirculation mode.