Oil field's neighbors aren't gushing over expansion plan

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When Hutchinson, 62, a noted political analyst and author, greets you at the front door, it's hard to tell that anything is amiss.

"It's a great neighborhood," he agrees. "It just has a fatal flaw."

Hutchinson's house in Windsor Hills, along with nearby Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, Culver Crest and View Park, make up a well-heeled, doughnut-shaped community that has had, from its inception, an unusual and awkward centerpiece: a 1,000-acre oil field.

The oil field was discovered in 1924 and is operated by the Plains Exploration & Production Co., a Texas firm better known as PXP. The company extracts about 9,000 barrels of oil and natural gas each day. And the arguments for capping production at that level -- much less turning the land into a park, as many have long hoped for -- seem to fray each day as oil prices soar and U.S. supplies tumble.

PXP is pushing to add new wells -- potentially, one every week or so for the next 20 years. Indeed, energy companies across Southern California are shaking off the long sleep once brought on by low oil prices.

Sometimes it's easy to forget about all the oil down there, easy to forget that before storied gushers like Texas' Spindletop ushered in the petroleum age, prospectors found oil near Chavez Ravine, supposedly by digging with a sharpened eucalyptus log. Today, drilling operations offer more potential return than they have in years, and scores of new wells are on tap, in Long Beach, in the Whittier Hills, in Ventura County.

Many will be small-scale operations, some hidden behind trees or fake buildings. You might never know they are there -- unless, of course, you live next door.

Hutchinson beckons you into his backyard. Until recently there was a tidy stone patio, surrounded by lemon and orange trees. That's been reduced to hard dirt. An umbrella that once went with a picnic table has been tossed into the shrubbery, where it is fading and cracking in the sunlight.

Contractors recently spent two months, and Hutchinson spent $125,000, lifting his home, tearing up the backyard and fixing a gaping crack in an exterior wall. He blames PXP -- specifically the vibrations of the drilling operation at the bottom of the hill behind his house.

With workers clanging away on a nearby well, Hutchinson runs a slender finger along a crack that zigzags up to a second-floor window. The crack isn't as bad as it was before, he says, but it's clearly started again -- three months after the repair job.

PXP denies its operation had anything to do with the damage. Regardless, the dispute is a taste of the kind of battle that will almost certainly spider-web across Southern California in coming years:

* In the Whittier Hills, where oil was first mined more than a century ago, city officials bought more than 1,200 acres of land in 1995 -- much of it from Chevron Corp. and the now-defunct Unocal -- with the goal of conservation. Today, Whittier is studying whether to reopen the land to oil production, said Assistant City Manager Nancy Mendez.

If the city decides that drilling could take place without damaging a wildlife corridor that stretches to Chino Hills, production could begin by 2011.

* In the Long Beach area, home to a 21-square-mile oil field, 70 new wells were installed last year and another 70 are expected this year.

Growth could come faster, but the region is hamstrung by a lack of experienced engineers and geologists, as well as by eager companies fighting over a limited pool of drilling materials.

"Your wants and desires are governed by what you can accomplish and what you can get ahold of," said Curtis Henderson, the city's manager of oil operations.

* Venoco Inc. is looking to increase production at its Southern California sites, said Mike Edwards, a vice president. At the firm's 65-well West Montalvo Field in Ventura County, for instance, production has increased between 20% and 30% in the last year, to about 1,000 barrels a day, he said.

"Elevated prices," Edwards said, "definitely make some of the properties that had marginal economics a lot more attractive."