Politics & Government
Letter: Fracking Should Also Be Banned in Culver City
The following is an open letter to the Culver City council from Culver City resident Stephen Murray.
Council members,
I would like to clarify a few things about the size, proximity and amount of planned activity for the Culver City portion of the oil field. This is data derived from the Baldwin Hills Community Standards District final Environmental Impact Report.
Only 10 percent of the oilfield’s surface is in Culver City but Culver City sits on over 20 percent of the underground portion of the oilfield. The field's boundary is defined by Divison of Oil Gas and Geothermal Resources, separate to the CSD.
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The oil field lies under our streets and stretches from City Hall, north to Venice and west past the Senior Center. (see attached image to the right.) PXP had released plans to do slant drilling under Ballona Creek and into the downtown neighborhoods in 2009 but was subsequently put on hold due to the EIR.
In addition, the number of wells planned for the Culver City section is not trivial. The operator has planned 100 wells over the next 20 years, which include both production and injection wells. This is a subset of table 3.1 in the EIR:
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Year
Culver City
2008
0
2009
0
2010
1
2011
13
2012
14
2013
18
2014
9
2015
8
2016
3
2017
3
2018
3
2019
3
2020
3
2021
3
2022
3
2023
3
2024
3
2025
3
2026
3
2027
2
2028
2
Total
100
I hope this shows that it is still useful to create a ban in just the Culver City portion of the field.
Stephen Murray
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