It’s one of L.A.’s oldest oil fields and it could hold up to $2 billion in additional oil at today’s high prices.

It is the 1,000-acre Inglewood Oil Field in Baldwin Hills, and Houston-based Plains Exploration and Production Co., which holds the rights to it, wants to drill hundreds of new wells on the site over the next 20 years. But getting at that oil is proving difficult at least politically.

The company, commonly called PXP, has already taken several steps aimed at appeasing neighbors opposed to the additional drilling, including drawing up an ordinance placing regulatory restrictions on its operations. The oil company has also agreed to refrain from pulling permits for any new drilling wells through October, to give officials enough time to review the plans.

All this even though the company says that all it legally must do is get permission from one state agency.

“We’re opening ourselves up to more regulation, which is not something that oil companies traditionally have done,” said Steve Rusch, PXP’s vice president for environmental, safety and government affairs. Rusch estimated that PXP has spent $10 million to date on mitigation measures, in order to accommodate residents although some say it was to avoid a lawsuit.

Yet these steps still have not satisfied many local residents and elected officials in Los Angeles, the county and Culver City. They want stricter limits on new drilling and other measures to reduce noise and the prospect of noxious chemicals being released. They also claim that the approval process is being rushed.

These issues will be coming to a head over the next two months as the county’s regional planning commission holds a series of hearings. The County Board of Supervisors is set to vote on PXP’s drilling plan in October.

The issue has now become a talking point in the campaign between state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas and L.A. City Councilman Bernard Parks for a county supervisor seat. Eager to get the votes of Baldwin Hills residents, both candidates are trying to position themselves as wary of PXP’s plan.

Parks introduced a motion in the L.A. City Council to explore a moratorium on new drilling. Even though the site doesn’t lie within Los Angeles city boundaries, some of the slant drilling extends underneath homes that are within city limits, according to Parks spokesman Bernard Parks Jr. Ridley-Thomas said last week he is “very concerned” about the impact of more drilling.

Push for deal

Nevertheless, Rusch said he is confident that the company can get the supervisors’ approval and will be able to start drilling two dozen new wells on the site next year.

Rusch and PXP earlier this year agreed to a far-reaching pact with environmental groups in Santa Barbara. That deal calls for the company to turn over 4,000 acres of land to the public for future parkland, and to shut down oil production off the Santa Barbara coast within 15 years in exchange for approval of immediate offshore drilling.

Some Baldwin Hills residents want a similar deal for the oil field in their neighborhood. “We would love to have an agreement for PXP to shut down abandoned or low-producing wells and turn the land over for park space,” said John Kuechle, a member of the Culver Crest Neighborhood Association and a member of the Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance, which was formed last year to fight PXP’s plans.

Rusch said that a deal modeled after the Santa Barbara pact is highly unlikely here because the Santa Barbara situation involved negotiations over a new lease, while in Baldwin Hills, the decades-old master lease to drill doesn’t expire until the site is deemed non-producing.

PXP, which acquired the lease from Chevron Corp. in 1991, has long had plans to expand production on the site. But those plans lay dormant through much of the 1990s as oil prices remained low. The field has been producing oil for 84 years, and the remaining oil is trapped inside deep rock layers and is much more difficult to reach. It can cost up to $2 million to drill a new well capable of extracting the oil.

However, by 2006, oil prices had risen enough to make the effort worthwhile, Rusch said. Over the next 20 years, PXP plans to drill up to 1,000 wells on the site, many extending out from the 600 operating wells or immediately adjacent to them. A total of 1,600 wells have been drilled since 1924, with many now abandoned.

However many wells are drilled, PXP is taking what Rusch considers extraordinary steps to ensure that noise, odor and health impacts are minimized. The only required step, according to Rusch, is approval from the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources.

“We could have just gone through the state and not subjected ourselves to this exhaustive process,” Rusch said.

But had PXP chosen that course, it probably would have faced a lawsuit from nearby homeowners.

New framework

PXP agreed to draw up a new regulatory framework, called a Community Standards District, that would govern the oil field, which is mostly in unincorporated L.A. County. This framework includes steps that PXP or any subsequent operator must take in order to minimize the impacts of drilling, from reducing vibrations from drilling rigs and generators to preventing the release of potentially toxic gases into the air.

L.A. County officials commissioned an environmental impact report on PXP’s proposal, which suggested even more steps to reduce the drilling impacts, such as flaring off gases to prevent them from escaping into the atmosphere.

This measure stemmed from an odorous gas release in early 2006 that swept through the Culver Crest neighborhood, prompting some residents to flee their homes. That incident helped galvanize opposition to any expansion of oil drilling operations on the site.

L.A. County Supervisor Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, who represents the area, said she is trying to walk a fine line between the concerns of nearby residents, the need for more domestically produced oil and the business interests of PXP.

“Sure, there are some residents who simply want to stop all drilling and remove the oil field. But if we did that, we would have to fight PXP. It’s better to have a plan in place that allows drilling but also protects the residents,” she said.

Burke also spoke of another complicating factor: Scores of property owners immediately adjacent to the oil field receive royalty payments from oil taken out of the site.

“Every time someone even hints at stopping oil production, I get stacks of letters from these folks saying they don’t want their royalty payments to stop,” she said.