Most of the news on oil and gas these days involves either commodity pricing or big deepwater discoveries by the likes of the U.K.'s BP
Take the steam flooding work being done by Chevron
In the Kern River field in California, for instance, the company is developing technology to increase the yield from aging fields. In its more than 100 years, Kern has yielded about 2 billion barrels of oil, but Chevron thinks it contains another 1.5 billion barrels. The company has been using steam flooding in one form or another to increase production in the area for more than 40 years. But new advances allow Chevron to target specific problem areas, halving steam use and cutting costs dramatically.
Earlier this summer, subsidiary Saudi Arabian Chevron announced that it had achieved its first steam injection in a large-scale pilot at the Wafra field in the Partitioned Neutral Zone (PNZ), which is controlled jointly by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Don't be surprised if you catch ExxonMobil
And don't walk away with the notion that the Kern County is finished; you should know that just this past summer, Occidental made a discovery there that is, at 150 million to 250 million gross barrels of oil equivalent, likely the largest find in California in the past 35 years.
So what does all this mean? My takeaway is that the Golden State serves as headquarters to a pair of companies that Fools should watch very carefully. Both Chevron and Occidental have repeatedly demonstrated a tendency for innovation in a variety of settings. With energy prices climbing, both companies merit attention.
Chevron and Occidental are both four-star companies, as judged by Motley Fool CAPS players. Why not add your assessment on the second-biggest and fourth-biggest U.S. oil companies?