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Los Angeles is hiding something. It's on these artificial islands, and in these fake buildings in the middle of the city. "We're standing right here. One, two, three. I can't even count how many oil wells. They're all inside this building right here." Another building on the same street has over fifty oil wells inside. They're all over the place. "So there's literally kids playing right there. And across the highway there's two pump jacks."
"Right there." "Wow." No matter where they are, they can cause breathing problems, cancer, heart and reproductive issues, and more. Not to mention recent news. "That's not water." "Crews estimated about five gallons a second." "Some of that oil making its way into the LA river from storm drains." Residents have been advocating for years to plug old wells and stop drilling. So how did this happen? And can it be fixed?
You might know iconic Venice Beach from how it was shown in Baywatch, but I'm here to hunt down some history. These Venice canals sit on the edge of a former oil field, one of many around LA. "I found some historical pictures from the UCLA library that shows this area how it was in the 1920s and 1930s.
This bridge here should be this exact bridge in the photo. And here you can see that behind it was full of oil derricks." A derrick is a tower that was used to drill and maintain oil wells. The modern version is a rig. Every derrick in these photos is on top of a well. Oil was one of the reasons people moved to this area of California. The city grew around it. At first, most of the wells were run by individuals and small oil companies.
The industry grew massive, and in the 1920s, California was producing about a quarter of the world's oil. Eventually, residents pushed to have the derricks removed. Oil extraction continued in other areas of the city. In Venice, many wells have been plugged for decades, sometimes with random junk, mostly with cement. On this map, you can see all the active, idle and plugged wells. When oil is being pumped out of a well, the well is active. You can see these in green. In California, a well that has not produced oil for two years is considered idle - these purple ones.
Idle wells are still open and are sometimes reactivated. The plugged ones are gray. If plugged correctly, the well can be safe. If incorrectly plugged, it can still quietly leak toxins into the air, water and ground. I decided to look up one that was under a playground. "Let's see. Wow, look at this! So this well was plugged five different times. April 7th 1959. This document is super long. The first document in this file is from March 27th, 1930." Many old wells are right next to, or under houses today.
"There's wells everywhere around here. We are standing on top of. ten? fifteen? oil wells right now. There should be one right there. Exactly where I'm standing. It's crazy." But as we saw on those maps - not all the oil wells in LA are plugged. These active ones are on top of the Wilmington oil field - the third largest in the United States. And they're also in disguise. "There's oil extraction happening behind me, but you would almost never know it. It's a sunny day. People are out here hanging out.
There's some people fishing on the pier, but there are two towers back there that are definitely oil infrastructure, almost hidden by the palm trees." Tourists who come to LA think they're hotels. Nearby sits the largest oil refinery on the West Coast. It's surrounded by neighborhoods in all directions, and close to popular beach destinations. Another area of LA is home to the Inglewood Oil Field - the largest urban oil field in the US. And it's eerily normalized, sitting right next to a public park.
"I guess it's part of life, you know, like, there's a bunch of them around here, and they're pretty hidden. If you don't, like, look on the map, like in Google Maps or something, like, you won't be able to see it." "Do you live in LA?" "Yeah, we do." "Did you know that LA is actively extracting oil?" "No, we had no idea." And not all the open wells are active. A 2023 Carbon Tracker report found that onshore production in California decreased by 42% since 2014. 39% of unplugged wells across the state are idle.
"They're littering the hillside over here." That's reflected in this LA oilfield - lots of purple dots. Both active and idle wells are a problem for residents. Regina Martin and Tianna Wakeman speak to people around LA about health issues caused by oil. Regina, who grew up directly across from the Inglewood Oil Field, has breathing difficulties. "This is my old elementary school. I've been in this community, Windsor Hills View Park area my whole life. The air would be so bad, we could see the air that we were breathing it was that bad back then.
There was just always this layer of gray air. You know, we couldn't even see downtown LA. We'd have to wait until it rained for it to be a clear day like this. Sometimes we couldn't go outside and play. We had to stay in for recess. So I used to deal with the nosebleeds, the headaches, the upset stomach, the red eyes. I always felt that everybody lived near an oil field. So it was just really, really normalized for me." When Regina gets close to the oil field now, she often has coughing fits.
Open wells release toxic chemicals like benzene and hydrogen sulfide. Studies have found people who live near them have reduced lung function. Both active and idle wells can also leak methane, an explosive greenhouse gas 80 times as potent as CO2. Around three million LA residents live within a mile of an active oil well. "We can also look at where active drilling is the most dense and where it's clustered. And we can also see where the largest urban oil field in the entire nation is. And it's here in South Los Angeles and it's next to majority black communities."
Another area full of both active and idle oil wells is around Vista Hermosa, where Rosalinda Morales and Brenda Valdivia grew up. These ones are right next to a school. "To the right of us there's another school. And these are within 300 feet or less of this oil field." "And then down the block is a county preschool." "Yes, there's a pre-school down here." "We're just standing here and I can definitely smell what's going on here."
"We've been here when it's even worse. This is mild today, but, you know, this is what we've grown up with." Rosalinda has breathing difficulties, and Brenda has lupus, an autoimmune disease which caused her to have multiple strokes. They're both confident their health issues stem from oil extraction. Increased risk of cancer, heart issues, birth defects and lupus have all been linked to oil wells. The difference between these neighborhoods and whiter, more affluent ones is stark. There used to be an active oil well on the grounds of a high school in Beverly Hills, one of the wealthiest areas of LA.
Residents complained and a famous environmental activist even got on the case. Afterwards, the wells were plugged. "There are protections that communities in South Los Angeles have been fighting for decades, that whiter wealthy communities in West LA have already received. So there is very clear environmental racism in that black and brown people saying, I want clean air, I want clean water, I want clean soil for my kids to play in is not received in the same way as when white, wealthy folks say the same thing." Tianna and Regina's organization is advocating for the closure of the Inglewood oil field, and the phasing out of oil extraction entirely in LA.
In 2022 the LA City Council discussed banning oil extraction in LA. "Gas, drilling and oil wells have disproportionately affected the health of our working class neighborhoods." And the law passed. "Thirteen ayes this item is adopted." It went into force in 2023, but the next year oil companies sued and it was overturned. They claimed the city didn't have the authority to phase out oil and gas. Three weeks later a statewide law passed that gave more power to cities, so LA is in the process of re-banning drilling. But not everyone is on board with kicking the industry out.
Both the state of California and that area of LA with those islands make money from oil production. As for idle wells, operators are legally required to plug them. But that's not happening: around 80% of LA's idle wells have been open for more than eight years, and a third for over a century. LA County is currently suing Sentinel Peak Resources, the owner of the Inglewood oil field, to plug its idle wells. "I tried to get in contact with Sentinel Peak Resources, the producer that's in charge of this oil field. But they never got back to me."
Recently, a new law passed that says oil companies must submit plans to clean up their idle wells or pay a fine. As of 2025, over 1,000 California operators had done neither. Some of those violations are due to the operator no longer existing or being bankrupt. Those idle wells that have no one responsible for them are considered orphaned. That's where the state of California is stepping in. "What are we going to see today?" "So what we're going to go see today is what we call the West Hills State Management Project.
These are a group of wells that were drilled in the 1950s. And they no longer have a responsible operator so they're what we classify as a deserted well, or an orphaned well." "And how many of those are around LA?" "We have thousands of them, and a lot of them that we have in the LA County area, the biggest challenge we have is accessibility. They could be underneath a garage, parking garage. They could be in someone's backyard. They could be behind a fenced wall. So there's different situations. When I first started at the state, it surprised me every single day where some of these wells were
and where they ended up. And as you can see, this is a functioning walking trail that the community around uses. This is a wild area, but it's in the middle of a neighborhood." CalGem, the state agency Pete Beskas works for, regulates oil and gas in California. The agency approves new drilling leases and permits operators to plug their own wells. It also hands out violations and collects fines. As part of its work, it's evaluating all the known unplugged wells in the city.
The agency chooses wells to plug based on accessibility and the danger they pose. They can't always plug them: if an idle well is underneath a building, for example, it's essentially impossible to reach. This well, right out in the open, is next on agency's list. "This is the well." "Wow, it really smells." "Yeah, so you can see it's venting so let's step back a little bit." To plug it, they first inspect the well for any junk to remove. Then, it needs a wellhead. This is one on a different well right next to the open one. "This is the wellhead setup that I talked about."
"So this is coming here?" "This setup will come here as well." "Oh, it looks very different from that well." "Well that's because that's old equipment. So what you're going to see is they're going to put a brand new wellhead. So that's this. And then this is what we're calling the blowout prevention equipment. So this is additional safety measures in the event that you have, say gas or water or oil that comes to the surface that you can't control." Then they use a rig to insert a long pipe into the hole. "If the well is clean and they've removed all the obstructions and everything else, that's when we start to layer cement. And then the last plug that we set is right at the surface,
so that in case anything else kind of fails, that's another safety measure. All this is expensive, but how expensive varies widely depending on the well. "You're going to see anywhere from a couple hundred thousand to many millions of dollars." "If one well, is going to cost a few million and there's thousands of wells in LA, do you have any estimate for like, let's say we're going to plug every well in LA? Is there any estimate for how much that's going to cost?" "That would be an exorbitant amount. Hundreds of millions of dollars.
The idea though, our target is that the operators themselves are responsible for abandoning their own wells." CalGem has permitted 20,000 well-plugging operations in the last five years. Recent legislation says operators must plug more wells or face fines of up to $22,500 per year. But those higher fines are not always paid. According to CalGems' own data, the agency collected just $1 million out of $36 million in fines in 2025.
And even if oil operators spent all their future profits on plugging wells, California would still be short by nearly seven billion dollars in funding. "In the end, it seems like when you say state budget, that's taxpayer money, right? That's going to plug these wells." "That's correct." We visited the site of some plugged wells in Vista Hermosa to see what it was like. Rosalinda and Brenda took us to a small street where multiple wells had been plugged, right in peoples' backyards.
"This is where the oil well was capped. The house was behind it, and it was right here in 2016." "I can actually look across now for the first time in my whole life and not have to see a pumping oil well that is emitting toxins every single day. And as you can see, the skyline. And then you had an oil well there. When you see something like that, it takes a minute to wrap your brain around it, because that should not be happening in this day and age." Still, on this small street, there are tons of uncapped wells.
Buildings in the neighborhood have warnings about methane. This security guard had no idea there was an oil well where he worked every day. And new construction has caused spills. "Both of these provoked an oil spill. And it went up that way and ran down about six city blocks. The cars were all splattered. It was like a river of oil." Residents also saw a spill in another neighborhood, from a well that had already been capped twice.
CalGem recommends that construction avoid wells. But local authorities ultimately decided to build around it anyway. "We've seen it happen, there were about six to eight wells. They capped one well, and they put up a huge building on top of all the others. They do have methane alarms. They were going off constantly when people started occupying the building." So the well plugging program isn't perfect but it is slowly making progress. Fines are now higher for operators who don't plug idle wells. And the LA-wide drilling phase out has passed one out of two votes in the city council.
It's a hopeful time for people who have spent years working to get oil out of LA. "I think people power wins. Community power wins no matter how litigious Big Oil is. But I'm also hopeful because we can just already see how we are moving away from oil and gas." But there's still a long way to go. Residents still feel they are not being consulted enough, and that wealthier neighborhoods are prioritized. Moreover, the state is only plugging those idle wells without an operator. Some idle well operators pay the fines, and some do nothing at all, so many idle wells are left open.
Most of the fines are uncollected, and even if they were, the money would still fall short. LA is an example of how a city can begin to deal with its oily history, but most of the money for plugging wells still comes from the state and federal governments. Residents bear the health burden of oil extraction. And when the oil runs out, they are left paying to clean up the mess. "So what do you think about what's happening here? Is it too much? Not enough? Let us know in the comments, also, don't forget to subscribe."
