Gail,

Even 2 bopd by grav drainage might be optimistic. But that's why the little guy can prosper in such an environment. With chatter about billion bbl oil fields and 88 million bopd figures I know it's hard to get our minds around someone making a good living off of 10 bopd. Again, none of this has any bearing on civilization’s future but I'm still tickled by those efforts.

Just one more little aside: even when only gravity drainage is all that's left you don't need all those pump jacks and oil tanks let alone steam plants. Long ago a farmer took over a group of shallow oil wells on his property. The previous oil operator had abandoned those wells after stripping the field of every pump jack, oil tank and even scrap metal lying on the ground. The land owner built a pulley on his tractor and ran a “swab line” off the power take-off of the tractor. A swab line is essential just a length of wire cable. He would roll up to a well and repeated pull the swap line in and out of the open casing head. With each pull came a little oil which he pumped into a small wheeled oil tank he pulled behind the tractor. I forget the numbers but he made a much better living off his oil production then farming. And the story doesn’t end there: as word spread and folks began duplicating his efforts a company in OK started producing tractors already set up for similar operations.

I wasn’t kidding: I’m sure after all the big oil companies are gone there will be thousands of one or two man operations still producing oil. Granted that amount wouldn’t fuel one small American city let alone the globe. But that wasn’t the initial point. Kern River will be producing commercial oil 100 years from today. And in time may well produce all the oil some predict. Not exactly a “Mad Max beyond Thunderdome” world. But you can tell how I admire the nature of a man to profit when a corporation cannot.

I don't think either of you two are catching my drift (see below).

Chevron has burned trillions, if not quadrillions of Btu of (our) natural gas to produce oil they have sold for a (handsome) profit. Over time, they've paid only a fraction of a dollar (per million Btu) for this. All the CO2 in that natural gas (or crude, when they burned that) is now contributing to the climate problem.

A sizable fraction of those Btu's still remain underground in the Kern River Field, suitable for recovery by existing pumping methods through the porous formations. The recovery of the electricity (including development costs) could be done within the investment budget that Chevron already has.

At some point they will want to "shut down" the oil production and abandon everything because it isn't "profitable" to produce the oil any more, and they expect us to approve of this???

Excuse me, but I don't think so!! If the Energy Commissioners of California are worth their salt, they should not allow it to happen. They have renewable energy goals that must be met. The Kern River "thermal" field (along with other San Joaquin fields) could make a significant contribution toward meeting those goals at minimal additional investment. It certainly would be far less costly than the electricity from CSP plants SoCal Edison has committed itself to buy.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then, You Win" M. Gandhi