We’re standing on a hill overlooking the ocean near the Santa Barbara County-San Luis Obispo County line. It’s a gorgeous view of the coastline. You wouldn’t know it now, but this was once a massive oil field, with hundreds of wells.
"Right now, we're standing on a dune overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There are waves crashing on the beach where 30 years ago, there were oil wells," said Jeff Moore, Public Affairs Advisor with Chevron.
The company is managing a decades-long project to restore this section of coast, which was home to the Guadalupe Oil Field. Chevron has just signed a deal to transfer almost all of the 2,800 acres of land to the federal government for a nature preserve, pending completion of a massive cleanup and restoration project.
"Back when this was an operating oil field, there were about 240 producing wells, and about 180 miles of pipeline," said Moore. "It was an industrial facility on the beach. Now, we can stand here on this bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and see restored beach habitat and restored coastal dune habitat."
Oil production started at the Guadalupe Oil Field in the late 1940s. In the '50s, Union Oil, which became Unocal, began using diluent in the wells. It was a kerosene-like chemical that made the thick oil easier to pump. However, it was toxic, contaminating the soil, underground water, and groundwater.
Oil production ended in 1994. State and federal agencies ordered the cleanup of the site, a project that started nearly three decades ago and continues to this day. When Chevron bought Unocal in 2005, it inherited the cleanup project.
Moore gave us a tour of what’s now called the Guadalupe Restoration Project.
As we drive around the site, we encounter giant earth movers taking contaminated soil to a staging area. For years, the soil was trucked to the Santa Maria dump for disposal. Now, the strategy is to keep it on site. It's safer because there are no longer daily caravans of tractor-trailer rigs taking contaminated soil to the dump. It's also more cost-effective.
The soil will be placed into a sort of sealed container. Crews are creating a giant oval bowl the size of the Rose Bowl, with a special lining to contain the contaminated soil.
"This is a soil management area we're constructing on site at the Guadalupe Restoration Project," said Moore. "This is where we are going to deposit all of the remaining hydrocarbon-impacted soil that we excavate from the site. The soil management area covers about 18 acres, so it's a huge landfill. Once we're done completing it, and all of the waste material is inside, we're going to install a cover system, and the habitat will be restored, so it will look like another one of these massive dunes."
There’s also a large onsite water purification facility, which has been cleaning contaminated underground water pumped from the ground by a series of wells.
Between 70 and 100 people are working on the project at any given time. Cleanup is just part of it. The goal is not just to remediate the land, but to restore it with native plants and animals.
Kimberly Paradis is Lead Project Scientist for the project with the Trihydro Corporation.
"We have some plants that are endemic to this location, that are not found anywhere else," said Paradis. "La Graciosa Thistle has been declining in areas other than our site here, so that is one of the great stories, as well as the (endangered) red-legged frog. We have frogs that are breeding here."
On a hillside, we ran into Jenny Langford, who’s a restoration biologist. She’s gathering seeds so that this section of the property can be replanted with native plants once the soil is remediated. Langford has worked on this project for nearly three decades.
"Here, I've been able to see the site get cleaned up, and then restored to even better condition than it was before," Langford explained. "All the soil cleaned up, all the wildlife coming back, endangered plants being restored, it's just been awesome."
More said the goal is to give the property to the federal government, to become a part of an adjacent nature preserve. Two weeks ago, the company signed an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to eventually take and manage 2,700 acres of the 2,800-acre site.
"In about three to five years, the land will be ready to be turned over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to become part of the Guadalupe Nipomo Dunes National Wildlife Refuge," said Moore. "We've worked with them to negotiate a donation agreement."
The final price tag for the project is expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But biologists say the goal is to do it right. It’s not just cleaning up the soil and water pollution. It’s an effort to restore the land, remove non-native plants, and leave it the way it was eight decades ago, before oil development began.
