The Inglewood field lies beneath the Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles County, wrapped by Culver City, Ladera Heights, and the Kenneth Hahn recreation area — the largest urban oil field in the United States. Standard Oil discovered it on September 28, 1924, and it reached peak output within a year. Cumulative production has approached 400 million barrels, and wells were still lifting thousands of barrels a day in the 2010s. Nowhere else does an active oil field sit so squarely inside a major American city, and that fact governs everything about owning minerals here.
Standard Oil Company completed the discovery well on September 28, 1924, in what were then the largely undeveloped Baldwin Hills. The field responded immediately — peak production came less than a year after the first well went in, with maximum output recorded in 1925 — and derricks covered the hills while Los Angeles expanded around them. Inglewood was one of several enormous Los Angeles Basin discoveries of that decade, alongside Signal Hill, Huntington Beach, and Santa Fe Springs, that briefly made Southern California one of the largest oil-producing regions on earth.
Secondary recovery began in 1953 with waterflooding, and cyclic steaming was added in 1964, lifting output through that decade before the long decline resumed. On December 14, 1963, the Baldwin Hills Reservoir dam failed and the resulting flood killed five people; subsequent investigation attributed the failure to ground subsidence associated with oil extraction. The event permanently shaped how Los Angeles regards the field, and it remains the reference point in local debates about drilling in the Baldwin Hills more than sixty years later.
Standard Oil, later Chevron, was the sole remaining operator by the 1970s and sold the field to Stocker Resources in 1990. Plains Exploration and Production followed, then Freeport-McMoRan in 2013, and Sentinel Peak Resources took over in 2016. Community opposition to hydraulic fracturing proposals has been persistent, and in 2021 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to phase out oil production in the field, with a subsequent settlement contemplating operations continuing into the late 2020s. Any Inglewood royalty forecast has to reckon with that timeline.
Inglewood sits on a faulted anticline along the Newport-Inglewood structural zone, the same trend that produced Signal Hill and Huntington Beach. Nine recognized pools produce from three principal formations — the Pliocene Pico, the Pliocene Repetto, and the Miocene Topanga — at depths from roughly 950 feet down to about 9,000 feet. The shallow pools hold heavier oil and the deeper ones lighter grades. The Inglewood fault cuts the field and compartmentalizes the reservoirs, which is why pool-by-pool performance varies so much across a footprint of about a thousand acres.
Waterflooding started at Inglewood in 1953 and cyclic steaming in 1964, and both have been used since to keep the shallow, heavier pools producing. What distinguishes the field is not the technology but the setting. Injection permits come from CalGEM, but land use, well-count limits, and phase-out timing are decided by Los Angeles County and by litigation, and hydraulic fracturing proposals have repeatedly met organized opposition from surrounding neighborhoods. Enhanced recovery here is constrained by the political calendar at least as much as by the reservoir.
Inglewood is the clearest case in California where regulatory timeline, not geology, drives royalty value. Roughly thirty million barrels were considered recoverable with existing technology, but the county has voted to phase out production and settlement terms contemplate a defined end date. A defensible valuation discounts the remaining stream over that horizon rather than assuming perpetual production. Owners deserve that math stated plainly. If converting an interest with a known regulatory endpoint into cash makes sense for you, we buy minerals and royalties in Los Angeles County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted in 2021 to phase out production in the field, and a later settlement contemplated operations continuing for a number of additional years. The practical effect for owners is that Inglewood royalties should be modeled over a finite horizon rather than assumed to continue indefinitely.
Investigations after the December 1963 collapse, which killed five people, attributed the dam failure to ground subsidence associated with oil extraction beneath the reservoir. It remains the defining event in the community’s relationship with the field.
Operatorship passed from Standard Oil and Chevron to Stocker Resources in 1990, then Plains Exploration and Production, then Freeport-McMoRan in 2013, with Sentinel Peak Resources taking over in 2016. Your check stub will show the current payor for your specific leases.