Oil in Los Angeles: Tenable Futures from Extractive Pasts

Oorvi Sharma, Zayed University

Document Type

Book Chapter

Source of Publication

After Oil A Comparative Analysis of Oil Heritage Urban Transformations and Resilience Paradigms

Publication Date

7-24-2025

Abstract

On April 21, 2020, the price of American oil descended below zero. Sellers were not just giving the commodity away—they were paying buyers to take unwanted crude off their hands. In the post-pandemic world, hydrocarbons are key in national and geopolitical exchanges. Beyond divisive realpolitik, the fact remains that national priority of fuel self-sufficiency unites opposite ends of the political spectrum, with the United States occupying the position of highest net daily production since 2017, with an average of over 12 million barrels of crude oil and condensates produced daily. The Angeleno hydrocarbon industry can be characterized as a predominantly privatized framework driven by geological opportunism. Consequently, oil production in the Los Angeles Basin follows a peculiar, indirectly proportionate correlation between land and oil prices. Oil is often extracted until it is cheaper than land, when wells are shuttered and the land is marketed and sold for alternate uses. Exploding land values over the last decade have precluded price parity from oil and, as a result, many Los Angeles oil wells have closed indefinitely to make way for new terrestrial and temporal transformation. This trend of closures will be hastened by motions for increased regulation targeting for cessation of urban oil drilling to protect homes, schools, hospitals, parks, and other public spaces. Interestingly, oil is not only hidden in the city’s self-image, its full extent has often been hidden from sight—as in the example of the Packard Well site—where over 70 pumps are concealed within an office building structure. Plans to rectify this dichotomy in Los Angeles must anticipate regional and national considerations. Much like these camouflaged sites of extraction and refining, this chapter analyzes an updated narrative which: (1) reveals the contemporary socio-spatial, environmental justice issues that have resulted from LA’s dependence on oil and (2) speculates how the “transition from oil” might productively manifest as disused industrial sites further proliferate the landscape. These findings will be reasoned through comparative analyses and historical contextualization.

ISBN

[9783031921872, 9783031921889]

Publisher

Springer Nature Switzerland

First Page

519

Last Page

543

Disciplines

Sustainability

Keywords

Environmental justice, Hydrocarbons, Los Angeles, Oil industry, Urban transformation

Scopus ID

105023603300

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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