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• Jan 30, 2008 4:26 pm US/Pacific
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  Off The Beaten Path: Oil Boom

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Off The Beaten Path: Oil Boom

Reporting
John Iander

If you wince every time you pay over $3 a gallon for gasoline, remember, you are helping support a little town down in Kern County.

The recent oil boom in our state is nothing new for folks who live in Taft.  The wells in California's most productive on-shore oil field are trying to keep up with our thirst for petroleum.

Many of these wells are coming back to life after being idle for years. Wells that had been pumped out are now being injected with steam to free up new reserves of oil.  Even some new wells are being drilled.

That means it's boom time for the oil field towns like Taft here in Kern County.  Taft's 18,000 residents are seeing a big increase in new businesses and homes.  John Hendricks is an oil field worker who says Taft is feeding on a big influx of new oil money.

"Everything else is working good, especially at a hundred dollars a barrel."

Remember, this boom and bust cycle is nothing new.  Longtime residents say this boom will be one to remember, Vera Morrow moved here over 60 years ago.

"We had an oil strike when I moved out here in 1945." 

John Iander asks, "You've had these oil booms and busts all the time here?" 

"Oh yeah, they go up and down, but they are up now."

Many Taft residents were born here and worked oil all their life.  They remember years when this town grew like crazy, only to slip into decades of hardship when oil was cheap.  86-year-old Harry Wilson thinks today's boom may last.  In his time gas was about 34 cents a gallon.

The oil field named Midway-Sunset was discovered in 1864 as explorers dug holes where oil was seeping out of the ground.  Later wells produced gushers spewing black gold.  This one could not be controlled for over a year and a half.  It actually created a lake of oil.

Today this field is producing about 40 million barrels of oil a year.  As long as we're hooked on oil and the price keeps climbing, the little town of Taft should see something a lot of other California cities are missing these days, prosperity.

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)