Who says you can't go home?

Oxy president Steve Chazen chuckled at the quick response from his boss during the company's second quarter analyst call and moved quickly to elaborate: "Over the years, most of those parties shifted their focus out of the United States into other places, and they sent their best people to the things that they thought were more attractive. And that's I assume what happened."

Macquarie analyst Jason Gammel flirted with that question, too, in his report, expressing surprise that "such a material conventional objective has been discovered in Kern County, an area that has been producing oil since 1899."

And Oppenheimer analyst Fadel Gheit explained Irani's Elk Hills reference, noting how that California play boasted reserves of 425 million boe when Oxy bought it from the government in 1998. Even after pumping 354 million boe from Elk Hills the past decade, however, Oxy still estimates reserves there at 491 million boe thanks to further exploitation.

As the largest acreage holder in California, Oxy just employed traditional geological efforts to confirm the neighboring Kern County discovery that could provide what Gheit calls yet another new production "growth engine" for a company that refuses to believe you can't go home.