Elk Hills Home Oil Company stock certificate 1921 (California)

San Joaquin Valley oil company. Stunning multiple vignettes - main left image of oil fields, gold underprint at bottom of oil fields, upper right border image of old oil storage, right border image of gushing oil well, lower right border image of horses pulling oil cart, and lower left border image of a steam train. Issued and uncancelled. Dated 1921. Measures approximately 11 x 8.5 inches.

The Elk Hills Home Oil Company was incorporated 1921 in California. The company owned property in the Elk Hills oil district in Kern County, operated a main office in San Francisco's Hobart Building, and expanded operations by purchasing the Burk lease in Taft, California.

The main office was located in the Hobart Building at Market and Montgomery in San Francisco, California. The company owned property in the Elk Hills district and acquired the Burk lease in Taft, California.

The Elk Hills Oil Field (formerly the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 1) is a large oil field in western Kern County, in the Elk Hills of the San Joaquin Valley, California, about 20 miles west of Bakersfield. Discovered in 1911, and having a cumulative oil production of close to 1.5 billion barrels and a cumulative barrel of oil equivalent production of 2.2 billion BOE at the end of 2023, it is the fifth-largest oil field in California, and the seventh-most productive field in the United States,

Associated Oil Company discovered the field in June 1911, with the drilling of their "Well No. 1," to a depth of 4,030 feet. The official "discovery" well, however, was drilled by the Standard Oil Company ("Hay No. 1") in January, 1919. By 1912 the field's capacity was considered to be significant enough that President William Howard Taft, concerned about the long-term availability of petroleum for the U.S. Navy, designated the region as the nation's first Naval Petroleum Reserve.

The Elk Hills have a prominent role in U.S. political history, when the lease of this land by Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, to Pan American Petroleum in 1922 in return for personal loans at no interest, that brought on the Teapot Dome scandal which ruined the reputation of the administration of Warren G. Harding.

The oil field went largely untapped, held as a reserve, until the mid-1970s, when Congress passed the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act in response to the 1973-1974 Arab Oil Embargo. In 1976 the Ford Administration opened the lands for drilling and production again. Occidental took over operations in early 1998 and has been the principal operator since then. Occidental Petroleum announced in 2009 that it had made a major discovery of oil and natural gas in Kern County, calling it the largest onshore California oil and gas discovery in 35 years.

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