Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Doug Leggate of Howard Weil.
Doug Leggate - Howard Weil
Thanks. Good morning, everybody.
Steve Chazen
Good morning.
Doug Leggate - Howard Weil
Steve, looks like a fairly clean quarter in the earnings, so if you don't mind I'm going to focus my questions on California. Couple of things, first of all you've been very clear that this is conventional production. That to me would suggest decline rates are more in the 10% to 15% kind of range, just taking a stab as opposed to the shale 60% to 80% type of numbers.
If that is reasonable, then based from your initial production, the production rates that you're telling us from these wells, is it reasonable to think that you're looking at something like 6 million barrels in that range, over the life of the field from each of these wells? What I'm trying to get to is what's it going to take to develop these things in terms of capital costs?
Steve Chazen
Well, that’s a lot of questions in few words. We actually don't know what the decline rate is since -- the issue inside the field is the recovery rate, recovery factors. So we don't actually -- if the range we're showing you is not that we don't understand the rock volume, but we don't actually know what the recovery factors are.
There is no good analogy that we can come up with that looks like this field anywhere in the lower 48. So we have not seen any declined to this point. We're low to estimate what the decline might be. Obviously, all wells decline.
If you have multiple zones, we have to develop each zone separately. So you'll have drilling in each of the zones and production from each of the zones. So we try to indicate the well cost and the result in finding development costs. But the development program which is still at work is going to be more complicated because each of the zones left will develop separately. We can't give you better guidance because we just plain don't know at this point. Obviously, this is a very large field and test results that support the size of the field.
Dr. Ray Irani
But the development of the field will be well within our financial capability in general.
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