Directly beneath my feet is buried approximately one billion dollars of cash. Well, maybe not cash, but as near to hard currency as makes no difference these days: oil.

Only a few minor obstacles stand between me and this emir's fortune. I live in the middle of one of the largest cities on Earth, Los Angeles, which means I am surrounded by multimillion-dollar homes, important thoroughfares, strip malls, movie theatres, office blocks and, most important of all, the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centre. Claiming my oil would almost certainly involve demolishing some or all of these things to make way for the necessary equipment. Oh, and there's another problem: the oil might not actually belong to me, depending on how the city divvied up the mineral rights a century ago.

But I remain optimistic. After all, LA's oil companies aren't letting such complications get in their way - not now that a barrel of oil can fetch more than $120. Over on Pico Boulevard they've gone so far as to build a fake 14-storey apartment block to hide a massive urban drilling facility. Meanwhile, down at Long Beach they've disguised their oil rigs as resort islands, complete with palm trees and fake timeshare buildings (someone should probably warn the Beckhams before they buy a package holiday there).

It's easy to forget that LA was an oil town long before it was Tinseltown. As recently as the 1950s, a young George Bush Sr sold drill bits here (he lived in Compton, which sounds as incongruous as, say, Dr Dre living in Alnwick). But the oil is still here - in fact, the city is practically swimming in the stuff. One of the main streets in Hollywood, La Brea Avenue, is named after the tar pit that lies just south (brea is Spanish for tar). There's even an active oil well in the grounds of Beverly Hills High School.

But why have LA's oil reserves been ignored for so long? Because at less than $100 a barrel, it just wasn't worth the hassle of urban drilling, not to mention the lawsuits from Erin Brockovich. But all that's changed. The latest wheeze: using existing drilling sites such as Baldwin Hills to bore sideways under neighbouring (and more expensive) properties, thus allowing the oil to be slurped without anyone even noticing. This is the “I drink your milkshake” technique, popularised by the Oscar-winning movie There Will Be Blood.

Naturally, many of my fellow Angelenos are seeing red - especially those residents of Culver City who woke up in the night vomiting because a drill beneath their homes punctured a rock full of malodorous gas.

But perhaps we should relax. Perhaps we should just hand over the entire city to the oil companies, who can replace it with a temporary cardboard cutout while they extract fuel that can be sold for trillions of dollars to the Chinese. As long as the proceeds are shared, who's complaining? After all, it's not like there isn't anywhere else to live. And I hear land is going cheap these days.

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