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Chevron Weighs Its Options After Defeat on Oil Drilling Plan

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Times Staff Writer

Chevron officials remained optimistic Wednesday that the company can drill oil wells in Garden Grove, despite a defeat before the Garden Grove City Council this week.

“What we’re doing right now is evaluating our options, and we’re not ruling out looking elsewhere or reapplying in Garden Grove,” said Margo Bart, Chevron’s Southern California land supervisor.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the council voted 3 to 2 not to certify as complete Chevron USA’s environmental impact report on the proposed drilling of as many as six exploratory wells on a 1.4-acre tract at 12891 Nelson St. in the next three years. If oil was discovered, as many as 50 wells could be developed over the next two decades, adding $500,000 annually to the city’s treasury, Chevron executives said.

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Bart said more than 1,200 residents had signed and returned postcards that the company mailed out seeking support for its proposal. “We’ve got a good feeling about Garden Grove, primarily because of the people,” Bart said. “I really believe that the community is behind the project. (But) I think a very small portion came forward Tuesday night as kind of an eleventh-hour opposition thing.”

More than 300 residents crowded into the council chambers, most of them attending to voice opposition to Chevron’s proposal.

Councilman Raymond T. Littrell, who cast the swing vote, told Chevron officials that he had “to wrestle long and hard” with his conscience.

“If Chevron still wants to put in wells, I don’t think they’re going to do it at that site. They had a number of problems,” Littrell said.

Those problems, he said, included visual and air pollution, plus a potential decline in property values during the company’s three-year exploratory phase.

“In addition,” Littrell said, “the city wasn’t going to get anything out of the company during the exploratory phase.”

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Chevron now has three exploratory wells in Garden Grove. Although no oil has been found in marketable amounts, the company has waged a 10-year battle to drill a fourth exploratory well.

By contrast, Huntington Beach has hundreds of wells that were producing almost 13,000 barrels of oil a day in 1985, according to the last available statistics.

Chevron had proposed an exploratory well designed for an urban environment and partially hidden, Bart said.

“There’s nothing in Huntington Beach that looks like what we were contemplating in Garden Grove,” she said.

Garden Grove’s model was patterned after Chevron’s 58-well Beverly Center site on San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles.

“We’ve been producing on that site for 20 years, and it has in no way detracted from the land or had an adverse impact on land values or environment,” Bart said.

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One factor that helped to sway Littrell, he said, was that the exploratory well had only a 10% chance of striking oil and finding what has been described by Chevron officials as an oil pool.

“In the meantime, it would have put an awful strain on future development,” he said.

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