High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Ellwood Oil Field (also spelled "Elwood")and South Ellwood Offshore Oil Field are a pair of adjacent, partially active oil fields adjoining the city of Goleta, California, about twelve miles (19 km) west of Santa Barbara, largely in the Santa Barbara Channel. A richly productive field in the 1930s, the Ellwood Oil Field was important to the economic development of the Santa Barbara area. A Japanese submarine shelled it during World War II, the first direct attack on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812, causing an invasion scare on the West Coast.