The landscape around the town of Lost Hills, California, is vast and barren. On an early morning, the sky was a pale, dehydrated shade of blue. Dust choked the air, each floating particle made visible in the morning light.

Lost Hills (population 1,745) is located approximately halfway between the Nevada border and the Pacific coast and halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Interstate 5 slices through town, where you can find a Love’s Travel Stop, two options for a truck wash, and four roadside motels, each for under $75 a night. The town is also neighbors with one of the largest oil fields in California.

Just past the intersection of Paso Robles Highway and State Route 33, known locally as “Petroleum Highway,” thousands of oil wells dot the gold fields. Pumpjacks flank the road, constantly bobbing up and down, up and down. The wells are a familiar sight in Kern County, which is the top oil-producing county in California and the fourth biggest in the whole country. Seven miles west is a starkly different sight: long lines of solar panels running perpendicular to the road, extending beyond the horizon. The sun beats down against their dark, reflective surfaces.

The oil field in Lost Hills is a reminder of the United States’ seemingly endless appetite for oil, as the US is now the top producer in the world. In contrast, the solar field is an indicator of the country’s shift toward renewable energy, with California now posting many periods in which renewable energy sources supplied more than enough electricity to power the whole state. Both the oil field and the solar farm were developed by the same company: Chevron. The oil giant uses the electricity generated by the solar facility to power the pumps and pipelines at the Lost Hills Oil Field. The panels generate approximately 80 percent of the oil field’s annual energy demand. “We expect that the project will provide more than 1.4 billion kilowatt-hours of solar energy over the potential 20-year term of the agreement,” a Chevron spokesperson said in an email.

Chevron's solar project in Lost Hills is a step toward the company's broader “aspiration” of achieving net-zero emissions from its extraction activities by 2050—what the company calls its “upstream” operations. “We are working on over 100 energy management projects forecasted to reduce emissions intensity by more than 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ [equivalent] per year once fully implemented,” the Chevron spokesperson said.

While the idea of an oil and gas company committing to climate targets seems promising, the actual benefits of this shift are modest, and they suggest little change in Chevron's environmental footprint. Reducing the climate pollution from its “upstream operations”—which covers oil exploration, drilling, and extraction—only accounts for about one-tenth of all the emissions from the oil and gas the company produces. The remaining 90 percent comes from actually burning oil and gas in everyday activities such as fueling vehicles, heating buildings, and generating electricity.

Chevron’s solar-powered oil field is a prime example of how new renewable projects can lead to just more energy without fostering the long-term goal of a clean energy transition. Sasan Saadat, a senior research and policy analyst at Earthjustice, says that at its Lost Hills oil field Chevron is generating “super low-cost solar that could be powering our homes and businesses, and instead, is using it to power the oil extraction process.”

Nevertheless, in the state of California, Chevron’s solar project is something the company can make additional profits from—profits that come, in this case, from state taxpayers. 

This is possible due to California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), which awards Chevron environmental credits for using solar to reduce the carbon intensity of the fuels it produces. Since the solar field was developed in 2020, Chevron has earned at least $12 million worth of environmental credits. The program, which began in 2011, was designed to improve the state’s air quality and to incentivize industry to produce fuels that are lower emission. But more than a decade after it went into effect, many environmental policy experts agree that the program in its current form is flawed and “dated.”

When the LCFS first came into effect, “there were no viable alternatives to using gasoline and diesel,” says Paasha Mahdavi, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Today, corporations are still able to take advantage of the credit, despite the fact that “there are so many alternatives now that basically obviate the need for a Low Carbon Fuel Standard,” Mahdavi says. “Chevron is not doing anything wrong from a compliance standpoint; rather, this is a clear flaw in the LCFS framework that needs to be addressed.” 

Saadat of Earthjustice says Lost Hills is a prime example of how the LCFS, “which was meant to penalize polluters, has effectively been hijacked by those polluters.” The Sierra Club of California is also skeptical of the law as used today. “While lowering the carbon intensity of combustion fuels is important, California cannot succeed by continuing to prioritize the same fuels that harm our communities and environment,” the organization has stated. “The LCFS program must stop excessively subsidizing combustion and other polluting fuels, and instead prioritize transportation solutions that are truly zero-emission.” 

In 2019, the California Independent Petroleum Association (CIPA), began organizing its members—which include Chevron—to cash in on the LCFS’ Innovative Crude Oil Applications program. CIPA, a group that has historically lobbied against environmental laws, explains its motivation for encouraging its members to develop renewable energy in its 2020 Annual Report: The LCFS provides oil producers with “a unique opportunity to lower energy costs and increase revenue. . . . These rewards come in the form of LCFS credits that have real monetary value, while at the same time sending a message to Sacramento that producers are successfully adapting to California’s changing policy landscape.”

In 2019, CIPA also published a guide to assist oil companies in applying for LCFS environmental credits. Following CIPA’s efforts in 2019, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved 12 solar development crude oil applications under the LCFS, all of which were in Kern County.

Residents of Kern County, who have long suffered the harmful health impacts of being neighbors with Chevron, are unconvinced by the oil giant’s environmental claims.

Air pollution from the oil and gas industry has set the backdrop of Lost Hills for decades. “After it rains, we can see the mountains, and then day by day, our visibility of the mountains gets obstructed by this opaque [layer] of particulate matter,” says Cesar Aguirre, a community organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, who has lived in Kern County for over 20 years.

Kern’s dirty air comes from a myriad of environmental hazards. Oil drilling, industrial agriculture, two hazardous waste sites, and the nonstop traffic on the major roadways that cut through the county make it one of the dirtiest air basins in the nation. Kern Country hasn’t met nationwide clean air standards since 1997, Aguirre says.

“We see flares [from the oil fields] that light up the night sky with puffs of bright red and orange flames,” Aguirre says. Many of the pumpjacks are in disrepair, leaking methane into the environment. Given the ongoing air pollution in Lost Hills, it is clear that Chevron must clean up its act, but many residents believe the solar field fails to get to the root of the air pollution problem.

The solar project “is purposefully confusing,” says Jasmin Martinez, coalition coordinator with the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition, who grew up and still lives in Kern County. “It’s greenwashing at its finest.”

Indeed, despite Chevron’s messaging, there is a stark discrepancy between the company’s climate-related claims and its operational realities. A 2022 report from InfluenceMap found that nearly half of Chevron’s public communications in 2021 contained positive messages about climate change, yet only 5 percent of the company’s 2022 capital expenditures went to “low carbon” activities. At the same time, Chevron’s oil production has been steadily increasing since 2021, and it's projected to continue increasing in the coming years.

According to UC professor Mahdavi, the perversity of using solar energy to extract fossil fuels and the apparent greenwashing it represents is a problem that persists worldwide. One of the world’s largest solar thermal plants, located in Oman, doesn’t power any homes or businesses; it is used for enhanced oil recovery, to send super-hot steam underground to get more oil from an aging reservoir. “It's quite an ironic situation,” Mahdavi says. He argues that developing renewables to scale has to happen quickly, and that the transition is made even “harder when you've got this deadweight of using renewables for extracting fossil fuels.”

Critics of the LCFS point to Lost Hills as a clear example of why the program needs to be reformed. Though the California Air Resources Board is currently working to amend the program to more effectively support the state’s climate goals, environmental groups are critical of the proposed amendments. The amendments make only modest tweaks regarding the subsidization of dairy and biofuels, while neglecting funding for zero-emission transportation. The LCFS’s funding has been “siphoned away from true climate solutions, especially those that have the greatest potential to help low-income communities in California access cleaner air and zero-emission mobility,” Saadat says.

We are at a “crossroads,” says Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and lawyer focused on the implementation of scientifically grounded climate policy. CARB has an opportunity to “substantially change the program to align it with California's goals,” Cullenward says. But thus far, it has been held up by the lobbying groups, including the biofuel and oil and gas industries, that are profiting from the program in its current form.

“If the [oil] industry is serious about a role in the energy transition, it needs to transition away from fossil fuels,” Mahdavi says. Continued public investment in schemes like the oil-pumping solar field in Lost Hills waste valuable time and money, Saadat says. They are, in his opinion, a “dead end.”