CALIFORNIA Era of small oilman dying

Independent drillers are being forced out as the oil field dries up.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) -- On a slip of flat, yellow earth dotted with sagebrush and foxtail lies the rusting legacy of three generations of drilling: a graveyard of toppled oil derricks -- and Bruce Holmes' solitary moneymaker.
Like a squeaky steel horse, the lone pump bucks and thumps, sapping crude from nearly a mile down.
Holmes spent 13 years' savings for the $200,000 well his brother installed a year ago. At 40 barrels a day, its haul exceeds the combined output of his 19 other aging pumps. All are older than the 64-year-old oilman, and barely yield a profit.
Holmes, who drives a dusty pickup and sports a brass belt buckle etched with his company's name -- Western Production Inc. -- is one of the last of the mom-and-pop oil producers in California's southern San Joaquin Valley.
"This is the end of an era," he drawls from under a Stetson-shaped hard hat.
What's happening
It's a common refrain in Kern County. Just as in parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana -- even in Los Angeles County cities such as Signal Hill and Long Beach -- its oil fields are slowly running dry.
At stake is not just the livelihood of independent drillers like Holmes but also the economy -- and identity -- of a region that for a century has helped keep California one of the top oil-producing states.
"People don't realize what oil has meant to the communities of the San Joaquin Valley," said Sally Kinney, 52, a waitress whose grandparents moved from Oklahoma during the Great Depression.
"Used to be everyone you'd meet had ties in some way to oil," Kinney said. "Now, fewer people know the fields. ... There's too many other options than to tie their future to a resource that won't be around forever."
Kern is still California's top oil-producing county, claiming 37,000 of the 43,000 wells statewide. At nearly 200 million barrels in 2002, the region generates three-fourths of California's oil, more than any state but Alaska and Texas and about a 10th of overall U.S. production.
Some oil companies continue to invest, and state officials predict there are at least 20 years of crude left in 75 active fields.
But it's a finite resource, and plugging parched wells is now a thriving business. In 2002, regulators issued 2,000 permits to drill new wells and 2,500 to abandon old ones, said Randy Adams of the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources. Where pumps once stood, housing developments and strip malls have blossomed.
The Kern County fields have been declining by 3 percent to 5 percent annually since 1985, Adams said. That's not an exceptionally high rate for an old field, according to industry experts. But because producers already are using advanced technology to tap pools, the drop is all the more acute.
Technology to the rescue
California as a whole is well-positioned to ride out the decline, said Ed Porter of the American Petroleum Institute. That's in part because nonconventional recovery techniques, such as steam injection, are being used to force out the molasseslike San Joaquin crude.
Other states, depending on the type and depth of their oil, haven't been equally successful in using technology to continue extracting in mature fields.
For big producers in Kern County, expensive technology is extending the life of the oil patch.
ChevronTexaco says it plans to invest $350 million in 2004 -- $100 million more than last year -- to build more than 800 new wells in the San Joaquin Valley.
Independent producers who don't have such deep pockets say they can't afford to keep relying on a fading resource.
Oil has been in the Holmes family's blood since 1923, when Bruce Holmes' grandfather moved here hoping to tap a gusher. Holmes expects he'll be the last to work the family business, to love the bitter smell of crude, to fall asleep to the clamor of an active oil field.
"It's everything I ever had," he says. "It's all gonna die with me."