Honor Rancho Oil Field

Honor Rancho is in the foothills north of the junction if Interstate 5 and westbound California State Route 126, north-northeast of the confluence of Castaic Creek and the Santa Clara River, in the Santa Clarita Valley. The town of Castaic is to the northwest, and the city of Santa Clarita is immediately to the south. Elevation on the oil field ranges from around 1050 to 1450 feet above sea level. Runoff is either to Castaic Creek on the west, or towards the Santa Clara River to the south. Access to the natural gas storage facility from the southeast is from Rye Canyon Road, and access to Vintage Petroleum's operations on the north and west is from Hasley Canyon Road, which also provides access to the prison. ==Geology==

The oil field is located in the northeastern extreme of the Ventura Basin Province, a petroleum-rich sedimentary basin with a long history of oil and gas production. Overall, the structure of the oil field is a plunging anticline oriented northwest to southeast, dipping to the southeast; most of the hydrocarbon accumulation is along the southwest flank of this structure,(1959) which resembles a southwest-dipping homocline. One stratigraphic unit, the Miocene-age Modelo Formation, contains oil and gas accumulations. To the northeast, the San Gabriel Fault closes the structure, trapping hydrocarbons with an approximate 500-foot offset, placing impermeable rock units adjacent to the petroleum-bearing Modelo formation. The other sides of the field are sealed stratrigraphically, specifically by permeability changes in the rock preventing hydrocarbon movement. ==History and production==

The field takes its name from the Wayside Honor Rancho, a former minimum-security prison founded in 1938, where inmates were rehabilitated in an outdoor, ranch and farming environment. Honor Rancho was a small oil field found after most of the large oil fields in the vicinity had already been developed. Southeast of Honor Rancho, across Interstate 5, is the Newhall Oil Field, site of the first commercially successful oil well in the western United States, Pico No. 4. But fields such as Honor Rancho were harder to find because the oil traps had no surface expression, like the prominent anticline of the Santa Susana Mountains in which the county's earliest oil wells were drilled. Texaco spudded the Honor Rancho discovery well in August 1950, finding oil at 6,000 feet below ground surface. Production grew for the next several years, with oil output peaking in 1957, and gas in 1965. In the Southeast Area of the field, gas injection was used from 1960 to 1966, and waterflood from 1972 to 1975, the year the Wayside 13 reservoir was converted to gas storage. In 1975, SoCalGas acquired the Wayside 13 reservoir for use as a gas storage facility. It was the fourth such facility for the utility, after La Goleta near Santa Barbara, Playa del Rey in Los Angeles, and Aliso Canyon north of the San Fernando Valley, and the third which had been an oil field. The Honor Rancho field was the first storage facility acquired by SoCalGas where they also owned the rights to the oil produced. Among the project aims was the removal of highly saline water from the bottom of the storage reservoir, which would allow an increase in total storage capacity by five billion cubic feet. In the current gas field, wells are connected to processing, storage, and transmission facilities by about of pipelines, both above and below ground. The design allows withdrawal of up to one billion cubic feet of gas per day. In January 2016, Santa Clarita City Manager Ken Striplin met with representatives of SoCalGas to determine whether the field had any of the same problems that led to the methane gas leak at the similar, but four times larger gas storage facility ten miles south. He determined the risk level was low. Similarly, Steve Knight, the congressional representative for California's 25th District, toured the facility, and told his constituents that the field "is checked constantly." ==References==