Where is oil found in the US?

The first commercial oil well drilled in the United States is attributed to Edwin Drake, who drilled a well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. As uses and needs for oil both for heating and transportation grew, oil exploration and discoveries were made across the US. For many years Texas, Oklahoma, and California were the largest oil producing states. Then, as traditional fields began to decline, oil exploraton turned to other areas where technological advances were required to find and produce oil. The largest oil field discovered in the US is the North Slope of Alaska, discovered in 1968 in Prudhoe Bay, which required Arctic drilling techniques and building of the 800 mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

The first offshore well drilled in the US was in 1896, when a 300-foot pier was built off the Santa Barbara Channel in California. However, offshore oil and gas didn't become a significant contributor to US production until 1938 when the first offshore well was drilled in the Gulf of Mexico from a 320-foot by 180-foot freestanding wooden deck in 14-feet of water about a mile offshore Creole, Louisiana. This began an oil boom that has been continuously extended as offshore exploration and drilling technology has enabled oil and gas production in deeper and deeper waters.

Even more recently, advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology have opened up significant quantities of shale oil reserves (see OWOE: What is hydraulic fracturing (fracking)? and OWOE: How has fracking changed the energy picture in the US?). The most prolific oil plays currently are the Eagle Ford in Texas, the Bakken in Montana and North Dakota, and the Spraberry in Texas and New Mexico (Permian Basin).

Figure 1 from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) for 2024 shows the history of US crude oil production since 2009 and projected forward. The US is currently producing approximately 11 million barrels of crude oil daily, of which about 2 million shows as Lower 48, but is predominantly from the Gulf of Mexico, and the majority of the remaining 9 million from the various shale oil provinces.

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