Oil Find Could Conflict With Plan for Santa Clarita Park : Exploration: If drilling hits a reserve beneath the Santa Susana Mountains, Chevron may not relinquish land proposed for a recreation area.

A petroleum consortium is boring an exploratory well three miles beneath the Santa Susana Mountains, where a major oil find could complicate efforts to create a state park in the Santa Clarita woodlands.

A 170-foot-tall oil rig has been erected in Towsley Canyon in the western Santa Clarita Valley to drill 16,500 feet underground. The prospectors will use a slant drilling technique to reach that depth some 6,000 feet south of the giant platform--or beneath the northern flanks of the Santa Susanas.

By the end of summer, partners in the venture hope to find an oil reserve they believe could contain up to 625 million barrels--worth nearly $12 billion at the current price of $19 per barrel.

“It would be considered a major discovery. . . .When we go looking for big fields like this, we call it ‘elephant hunting,’ ” said Rod Keller, a Canadian oilman and technical adviser to Oklahoma-based Samedan Oil Corp., a member of the consortium.

The rig, a towering mass of pulsating machinery, was assembled by two 100-ton cranes from 70 tractor-trailer loads of components. It stands on rugged land owned by Chevron, next to 453 acres owned by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

Chevron, which owns about 3,000 acres in the Towsley Canyon area, has capped its own idle wells there--which are all much shallower than the exploratory well.

Although oil production in the area has ebbed, the industry has a long history in the Santa Clarita Valley. Pico Canyon was the site of the state’s first oil well, drilled in 1876. Local historians are fond of pointing out that the brick and metal shell of the first successful oil refinery in California, also opened in 1876, is located in Newhall.

Pat Curvin, a land representative for Chevron U.S.A. Production Co., called the Towsley Canyon project a “farm-out” by the oil giant--whose involvement in the $3.5-million venture is limited to providing the land.

Samedan and its partners “think more of the prospect than we do,” Curvin said. “Had we thought more of it, we would have drilled ourselves.” If there is a major find, however, Chevron will get a percentage of profits, he said.

The search raises interesting possibilities, besides the discovery of oil wealth. A major find could have environmental consequences, and might complicate efforts to establish a new state park on thousands of acres of the northern slopes of the Santa Susanas.

Chevron is assessing how to develop or dispose of its holdings in the area. Park supporters hope Chevron will sell or donate land to the proposed Santa Clarita Woodlands State Park, but an oil find could make it less inclined to do so.

A big discovery might also extinguish Los Angeles County sanitation officials’ flickering hopes of developing a huge public landfill in Towsley Canyon. In acquiring 453 acres for the woodlands park, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has blocked access to part of the canyon, cutting dumping capacity at least in half.

Curvin said Chevron is weighing its options and awaiting the results of the exploratory drilling. “We’re taking this one first, just because it’s going to be definitively determined within a year if there’s oil there of the magnitudes they’re talking about,” he said.

If a big reserve were found deep underground, a few centralized drill sites would be sufficient to tap it, Curvin said. A park could coexist with such an oil field, but a dump and an oil field “would be a lot tougher,” he said.

Keller joked that the odds of a major find are “fifty-fifty,” because “either we find it or we don’t.

“I don’t talk in odds,” he added. “We’re going to find it.”