For generations of Ventura and Ojai residents, passing by an active oil refinery along Highway 33 with its steaming valves and hissing sounds was a normal occurrence. Elementary schools in the 1970s regularly sent busloads of kids on field trips to visit the USA Petrochem facility where some of their parents and neighbors worked.
After a slow bus ride through the complicated tangle of pipes and giant green tanks — state-of-the-art at the time — students filed into an office building at 4777 Crooked Palm Road to watch a reel-to-reel 16mm movie showing how different grades of locally produced crude oil were turned into a variety of products ranging from jet fuel to asphalt and plastic.
About 12,000 barrels a day continue to flow from the nearby Ventura Oil Field, operated by Aera Energy until that company was purchased by Germany-based IKAV as part of a $2.1 billion transaction in February 2024. The refinery is long gone, however, having closed down in the mid-1980s, with just a few graffiti-covered shells of buildings remaining. Future field trips to the site may reveal something completely different: a nature preserve managed by the Ventura Land Trust.
Conservation nonprofit buys 101 acres
The Trust for Public Land (TPL) is a nonprofit with a history of buying up property to conserve and then passing the land off to local groups for restoration, management and curation. TPL has protected more than 4,000,000 acres of public land since 1972, while raising $112 billion in public funding…