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Third largest?

The opening paragraph says that the field is the "third largest" in the US, but "largest" here can refer to any one or more of a number of measures:

  • areal extent
  • past cumulative production
  • current production rate
  • remaining recoverable reserves
  • estimated ultimate recovery

To which does the article refer? anyone know? Plazak ( talk) 15:25, 23 July 2010 (UTC) reply

I'm pretty sure it was estimated ultimate recovery; I can check later (I'm the one who wrote the article). Unfortunately there is a competing claim for the Wilmington field, which also wants the third-largest spot; I was using government figures (either DOGGR or USGS) for oil field articles, and there are some different figures released by the petroleum industry. Antandrus (talk) 16:08, 23 July 2010 (UTC) reply

Environmental history paper, 2018

Field Trip to the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, California, 5/31/2018. Author is a Ph.D. student whose family lives in the area. For the article, author documents the Lakeview No. 1 gusher of 1910, that spilled & largely wasted around 9.4 million gals of crude oil in an 18-month period, before the well was brought under control, apparently by a cave-in. -- Pete Tillman ( talk) 04:38, 10 April 2019 (UTC) reply

I'll add the nice 1910 foto of the gusher to Lakeview Gusher. And note that there were at least 2 Lakefield gushers! -- Pete Tillman ( talk) 05:43, 10 April 2019 (UTC) reply
It's still pretty spectacular, if you've been out there. The degraded crude oil now just looks like asphalt, puddled and ponded with little ripples on its surface, and you can follow it more than a mile downhill through the scrub. Right around the location of the old Lakeview 1 well it's several feet thick. Antandrus (talk) 14:06, 10 April 2019 (UTC) reply