McKittrick Oil Field the Teapot Dome Scandal of the Warren G. Harding administration; adjacent to the southwest is the Belgian Anticline Oil Field, along Route 58; and to the southeast is the huge Midway-Sunset Oil Field, the third largest oil field in the United States. The total productive area of the field is . The field is about long on the southeast to northwest axis, and about across. The predominant geologic feature, and the one that makes the McKittrick field distinctive, is the presence of a huge block of Monterey shale – more than long, approximately wide, and up to thick – which
History of the oil shale industry in the United States the norm. But in the late 1850s, those positions were reversed. By 1859, when some venture capitalists hired Edwin Drake to drill for oil in western Pennsylvania, the oil shale industry was well established, and it was the idea of drilling for crude oil that was unproven. Petroleum distillation had been going on in the US at a small scale since 1851, when Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania salt manufacturer Samuel Kier began taking the petroleum which was fouling his salt wells, and distilling it in a five-gallon still into lamp oil which he sold to coal miners. Kier never patented his distillation