Background
Los Angeles is known for its palm trees and beaches, but one thing many don’t know is that it is an oil-rich city. Los Angeles has been an oil town since oil was first dug up in 1892. Oil flows underground in oil fields spread across Los Angeles County. When in Los Angeles County, there are many drill holes around the city. There is no surprise that there is a large oil refinery landscape with tall plants pumping out emissions. Large plants add to the skyline for many Angelinos and seeing these around becomes an everyday normal. Where are the oil fields located in Los Angeles County and where are the wells located?
Materials
I gathered data from The Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources of the California Department of Conservation and the Los Angeles Geohub. The data collected includes the boundaries for Los Angeles County, the location of oil/gas wells in California, and the location of oilfields in/around Los Angeles County. The materials used to analyze the data set are Excel and ArcGIS. Excel is used to filter the data and ArcGIS is used to map the data.
Methodology
In Excel, I filtered out the data that includes the location of gas and oil wells in Los Angeles County. I also filtered out wells that were not located in Los Angeles County. This data was removed from the data set to solely focus on this area.
In ArcGIS, I imported the data from excel. This file included active, idle, and new wells. I had an issue with uploading the CSV file with the data I filtered so from the Los Angeles GeoHub I was able to use a featured layer. The data included the same points I needed to locate each oil/gas well. Each dot represents an oil/gas well. Each type of well is assigned a different color. I assigned green for the active wells, orange for idle wells, and red for new wells. Active wells are those that are currently in use to drill oil. Idle wells are still in place and not active. These wells are only used sometimes when oil prices soar to get the full benefit of drilling more oil and making a bigger profit. New wells are new additions to the city.
Under the oil/gas well points, I layered an oil fields map. This was layered under to create a visual hierarchy to highlight the most important information. The oil fields are transparent to not take away attention from the oil/gas well points. There are also city outlines and county outlines to only highlight Los Angeles County that I was able to gather from the Los Angeles GeoHub. I added a transparent fill on Los Angeles County to also show where the county is. I did this to not have the rest of the California map hide in the background.
Results
The top layer of the map is the operational oil/gas wells in Los Angeles County. The layer to follow is the oil fields. Under the oil fields, I layered the city lines. The outline for Los Angles County is the bottom-most layer.
On the map that I visualized from the dataset, there is a clear pattern. My interpretation is that most oil/gas wells are located on top of an oil field. Something I did not expect was there to be so many active oil wells within the county. There are also many idle oil wells. There are millions of people that live within a few feet or miles of a drillhole. An interactive map can be found here.
Reflection
After seeing the data in a visualization, it becomes clear that more drillholes in Los Angeles county are located above oil fields. There are thousands of these wells across the county. There are also thousands of Angelinos residing next to these wells that emit toxic chemicals. My next question to answer is how these oil wells affect the quality of life for residents of Los Angeles County? Is there a contribution to air quality?