Energy Fair Brings Exhibits, Demonstrations

Everything from state-of-the-art offshore oil platforms to how Chumash women once used washed-up crude oil to caulk their food baskets was covered Wednesday during Energy Day ’98 at the Ventura County Fairgrounds.

Even a NASA astronaut, Scott Horowitz, who once lived in Thousand Oaks, was on hand to staff an energy information booth.

About 32 companies and agencies, mostly oil-related, mounted exhibits and technical demonstrations at the fair, which was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute. Ventura County has more than 2,700 oil wells in production, both onshore and offshore.

“What they’re doing with oil exploration technology now would have been unthinkable four years ago,” said Kermit Giddens, who coordinated student tours of the event for the institute.

Using horizontal drilling beneath the ocean floor, an oil platform can now support up to 24 drilled wells, he said.

Floyd Clawson, event co-chairman, added, “They’re called ‘extended reach’ wells--they can drill six miles horizontally now, and get up to 10 times more production.”

Clawson said technology also allows oil producers to get the final 10% to 20% of crude oil out of a field where it once would have been abandoned as uneconomical. Initially, wells produce big, he said, but the number of barrels of daily production dwindles over the years and such wells were once shut down with as much as one-fifth of the petroleum remaining because it simply was not cost-effective to keep drilling.

Federal regulators also staged exhibits.

Science students from several Ventura County high schools made the rounds of exhibits, and 11 were presented with energy scholarships by Horowitz.