VIDEOS

Skyscrapers On The Sea

Take your students on a virtual tour of Platform Gail in this 20 minute video. Show them what an oil platform looks like up close and how it operates. Your students will also learn the steps the crew takes to prevent oil spills in addition to their way of life while working on the platform.

Carpinteria Harbor Seal Colony

Give your students an up close look at the Carpinteria Harbor Seal Colony. Scientists from the Marine Mammal Center will explain the uniqueness of the Harbor Seal Colony and instruct your students on the actions they can take to preserve this special place.

POSTERS

Nature's Illusion

The watercolor appearance in the poster to the left is an actual photo of a natural slick that covers several miles of waters in the Santa Barbara Channel near Coal Oil Point. Natural oil and gas seeps there leak an estimated 6,000 gallons of oil each day, as they have for thousands of years. Archaeological evidence shows they indigenous people in the Santa Barbara area used oil and tar as far back as 6,600 years ago.

The natural seepage comes up cracks and faults caused by ancient earthquakes in the rock beneath the ocean floor. Like carbonated soda bubbles,the gas bubbles float to the surface of the ocean, where they burst into the atmosphere. The oil evaporates, degrades, and then eventually congeals into floating balls of stick tar. Tide currents and winds wash the tar onshore where it winds up as the all-too-familiar black mass along many local beaches.

Oil Plays a Big Part In Our Lives

More than 6,000 products are made from petroleum. Our poster includes a partial list of those products, a crossword puzzle for students and a detailed picture of how oil plays a big part in our homes and everyday lives.

BROCHURES

Santa Babara's Many Natural Attractions

As you walk the beaches from Rincon to Gaviota in Santa Barbara County stop to look at the rocks that are exposed in the sand and the cliffs. Ten million years ago those rocks were lying flat, under thousands of feet of water. Microscopic animals flourished near the surface, much like the algae blooms (or red tides) of today. As those creatures died, their bodies settled on the ocean floor and eventually formed the layers of black and white rock that we see all along the beaches today.

Teach your students about this phenomenon and about the second largest natural seeps in the world.

Look Who Calls This Place Home

Because of its unique location, the Santa Barbara Channel is home to many different types of marine life. Offshore oil platforms provide some of the most diverse habitats in the channel. Platforms offer hard surfaces where invertebrates, like mussels and barnacles, attach themselves. Many invertebrates encrust not only the steel structure, pilings and pipes, but also cover the sea bottom around the platforms.

Show students how the immense size and extensive vertical profile of an offshore platform promotes the growth and development of large populations of diverse organisms.

Carpinteria Harbor Seal Colony

As you walk out onto the Casitas Pier in Carpinteria, California, you are passing a very special place. To your left is a harbor seal colony, where the seals bear their young, breed and haul out to rest. Well over 300 harbor seals have been seen here on occasion.

This colony has existed for over a century. Moreover, it has thrived next to the bustling Casitas Pier, which for decades has served the oil industry. It is also near the onshore processing facility which has existed for years.

Remarkably, this seal colony is only one of two such places along the Southern California coast that is readily accessible to the public. Teach your students how this colony has thrived and is protected.

Faces of Venoco

What you can't see when you look out at our platforms are the faces of the dedicated people at Venoco. Getting to know the people who work for us is the best way to understand our unique approach to producing energy that we all need in the safest and most environmental responsible way possible.

Introduce your students to our geophysicist, air quality coordinator, Ellwood supervisor, facility managers, and offshore facility manager.