In 1958, the University of Texas Board of Regents moved the Santa Rita No. 1 well’s walking beam and other equipment to the Austin campus. After the dedication, the student newspaper described the well “as one that made the difference between pine-shack classrooms and modern buildings.”

The Permian Basin, once known as a “petroleum graveyard,” began to make U. S. petroleum history in 1920 with a discovery by W. H. Abrams in Mitchell County in West Texas. But when completed, his well produced just 10 barrels a day.

It would be another discovery well, the Santa Rita No. 1, that convinced wildcatters to explore the full 300-mile extent of the basin from most of West Texas into the southeastern corner of New Mexico.

Although many experts still considered West Texas barren of oil, the Santa Rita well will produce for seven decades after tapping into the vast commercial oil production of the Permian Basin.

Near Big Lake, Texas, on arid land leased from the University of Texas, Texon Oil and Land Company made its major oil strike May 28, 1923 – after 21 months of cable-tool drilling that averaged less than five feet a day.

Discovery of the Big Lake oilfield in 1923 will lead to many boom towns, including Midland, which some will refer to as “Little Dallas.”

Within three years of the discovery, petroleum royalties endow the University of Texas with $4 million (legislators had given the land to the university when it opened in 1883).

The Texas board of regents will move Santa Rita’s drilling equipment to the campus in 1958, “In order that it may stand as a symbol of a great era in the history of the university.”

Santa Rita’s walking beam today stands near the campus library. After the dedication, the student newspaper of the day described the well “as one that made the difference between pine-shack classrooms and modern buildings.”

The original Santa Rita equipment is now a permanent exhibit at San Jacinto Boulevard and 19th Street on the Austin campus of the University of Texas.

The original Santa Rita No. 1 site can still be found near Big Lake. The historic well was spudded shortly before midnight on August 17, 1921 – on the last day before the 18-month drilling permit was to expire. Progress was slow.

Drilling crews, when available, “consisted mostly of cowboy roustabouts who were distinguished for high absenteeism and steady turnover,” notes one historian. The well was often shut down and roughnecks laid off because cash was not available to pay salaries or buy supplies.

Several months after drilling began, one of the well’s increasingly desperate owners, Frank Pickrell, climbed to the top of the derrick. He threw out rose petals that a group of Catholic women investors from New York had given him.

Pickrell christened the well for the patron Saint of the Impossible – Santa Rita.

The Big Lake field – at 4.5 square miles – revealed that vast oil reserves in West Texas came from both shallow and deep formations. Exploration spread into other areas of the Permian Basin, still one of the largest oil-producing regions in the United States.

On May 25,1923, oil and natural gas began to show at the well. On May 28, a loud roar was heard and Santa Rita No. 1 blew in. People as far away as Fort Worth traveled to see the well. When the necessary casing and other well equipment arrived a month later, it was brought under control – and the first commercial well in the Permian Basin went into production.

In the fall of 1923, Pickrell found an important investor, Michael L. Benedum, the highly successful independent oilman from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Benedum and another Pittsburgh wildcatter, Joseph Trees, purchased Texon properties and formed the Big Lake Oil Company in 1924. The new company’s president, Levi Smith, would be instrumental in creating Big Lake – the first oil company town in the Permian Basin.

Santa Rita No. 1 well, capped in May 1990, is remembered with a replica that stands in the Reagan County Park in Big Lake.

A Midland, Texas, museum exhibits Permian Basin history.

The Big Lake oilfield proved to be 4.5 square miles and demonstrated that vast oil reserves in West Texas came from both shallow and deep horizons. Exploration spread into other areas of the Permian Basin, which would become one of the largest oil-producing regions in the United States.

Learn the story the Permian Basin at the Petroleum Museum in Midland. Not far from the museum, in Odessa, an Ector County historical marker notes “the first Permian Basin dry hole” was drilled in 1924. Pennsylvania oilmen drilled the well to 900 feet and found only “Red Bed” rock, notes the 1965 marker. The well was abandoned — but by 1964 Ector County would have 9,600 oil wells.

The Big Lake oil industry is part of a 2002 Disney production.

Movie features Big Lake Baseball Coach

The 2002 movie “The Rookie” was filmed almost entirely in West Texas. It features a Big Lake high-school teacher.

Based on the “true life” of baseball pitcher Jimmy Morris, it tells the story of a Big Lake’s baseball coach, Morris (played by Dennis Quaid), who despite being in his mid-30s briefly makes it to the major leagues.

The movie – promoted with the phrase, ”It’s never too late to believe in your dreams” – opens with a  flashback scene near Big Lake, the Santa Rita No. 1 drilling site.

In the movie “The Rookie,” Catholic nuns christen the well. In reality, one of the well’s owners climbed to the top of the derrick and threw out rose petals given to him by a group of Catholic women investors.

As the well is being drilled, Catholic nuns are shown carrying a basket of rose pedals to christen it for the patron Saint of the Impossible – Santa Rita. “Much is made of the almost mythic importance of oil in Big Lake, with talk of the Santa Rita oil well,” explains an ESPN article, the “The Rookie in Reel Life” story.

“Santa Rita No. 1, named the ‘Oil Well of the Century’ by Texas Monthly, was productive until 1990,” notes ESPN. “The University of Texas owned the land on which the oil was discovered, and the well has helped make the state university one of the country’s richest.”

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When a well strikes a high-pressure formation about 6,500 feet beneath Oklahoma City – and oil erupts skyward – the prolific Oklahoma oilfield will become famous worldwide.

Newsreel photographers will send film of the “Wild Mary Sudik” well to Hollywood. Within a week, newsreels appear in theaters around the country. When the Mary Sudik is brought under control, crews will recover 200,000 barrels of oil from pits and ponds.

The Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company’s Mary Sudik No. 1 well flows for 11 days before being brought under control on April 6, 1930.

The well, which produces about 20,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas a day, becomes a public sensation known as “Wild Mary Sudik.”

The giant discovery is featured in newsreels and on radio, according to “Oklahoma Journeys,” an audio program of the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City.

“At about 6:30 the morning of March 26, 1930, the crew of roughnecks drilling a well on the property of Vincent Sudik paused in their work,” the program begins about the well, which is near I-240 and Bryant Street in present day Oklahoma City.

“The tired drillers had been waiting for daylight to continue their work,” the audio tape notes.

Experts control the well with “a clever ball-shaped contrivance” that lowers a two-ton “overshot” cap.

The program’s narrator Michael Dean notes that after drilling to drilling to 6,471 feet, the roughnecks overlook a dangerous pressure increase in the well.

“The exhausted crew failed to fill the hole with mud,” he explains. “They didn’t know the Wilcox sand formation was permeated with natural gas under high pressure, and within minutes that sand under so much pressure found a release.”

The drilling crew is caught off guard when oil and natural gas suddenly “came roaring out of the hole,” Dean adds.

“Pipe stems were thrown hundreds of feet into the air like so many tooth picks. First there was gas then the flow turned green gold and then black,” he reports. “Oil shot hundreds of feet into the air, and for the next eleven days, the Mary Sudik ran wild.”

“Wild Mary” Daily Updates

On April 6, Floyd Gibbons of NBC Radio – who broadcast regular reports about the well – reports that after two unsuccessful attempts, the well is closed with a two-ton “overshot” cap.

An Associated Press article describes the “clever equipment” required to control the well without sparking a fire – a “double die was screwed into four inches of casing threads…a clever ball-shaped contrivance, called a fantail, was used to affix the double die to the casing.”

The fantail was placed over the well, “and the ‘Wild Mary’s’ pressure, playing through jets in the contrivance, aided in lowering the cap through the blast,” the article explains.

“With the petroleum geyser halted, operators in the field drew sighs of relief,” it concludes. “A stray spark from two clanking pieces of steel and the territory might have become a raging inferno.”

With the well was brought under control and the danger of fire eliminated, drilling continues at a frantic pace elsewhere in Oklahoma City.

However, the prolific, high-pressure of the Wilcox sands formation continued to challenge drillers and the technologies of the day.

An article in the Southwest Missourian newspaper reported:

Oklahoma City, April 7 – A gas well, estimated to be producing at a rate of 75,000,000 cubic feet a day, blew in at the edge of the city today, creating a new fire threat less than 24 hours after the wild No. 1 Mary Sudik gusher, several miles to the south, had been brought under control.

Recognizing the risks of drilling into the Wilcox sand, Oklahoma City passes additional ordinances for safety and well spacing in the city.

Although the first ram-type blowout preventer had been patented by James Abercrombie in 1926, many high-pressure Texas and Oklahoma oilfields would take time to tame.

The Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City includes the Devon Energy Oil and Gas Park.

In December 1933, Abercrombie patented an improved blowout preventer (patent No. 1,834,922), that set a new standard for safe drilling during the Oklahoma City oilfield boom. Read more in “Ending Oil Gushers – BOP.”

Visitors today  can see the valve that split in half and view newsreel film of the Wild Mary Sudik in the oil and gas and natural resources on exhibit at the Oklahoma History Center.

There also is the Devon Energy Oil and Gas Park with drilling and production equipment at the center, located on N.E. 23rd Street just east of the state capitol.

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February 5, 1873 – “Moonlighter” shoots his Last Illegal Well

Nitroglycerine could prove fatal to illegal oil well shooters – “moonlighters.”

Andrew J. Dalrymple is killed with his wife in a nitroglycerin explosion at his home on Dennis Run, Pennsylvania.

Dalrymple is alleged to have been “moonlighting” – illegal oil well shooting – in the Tidioute oil field. Nitroglycerine was a powerful but dangerous means of fracturing (fracking) oil bearing strata to increase production. The technology had been patented, its use rigorously protected.

“The Dalrymple torpedo accident at Tidioute brings to light the fact that nitroglycerine, or other dangerous explosives, are used, stored and manipulated secretly in places little suspected by the general public,” reports the Titusville Morning Herald.

“A large amount of this dangerous material has lately been stolen from the various magazines throughout the country, ” the newspaper adds. “This species of theft is winked at by some parties, who are opposed to the Roberts torpedo patent.”

The modern term moonlighting comes from this practice of surreptitious avoidance of licensing fees imposed on the use of Civil War veteran Col. E.A.L. Roberts’ patented fracking technique. Read “Shooters — A Fracking History.”

Read the rest of this entry »

As early 20th century worldwide demand for oil grew – but the science for finding it remained obscure – a small group of geologists organized the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG).

Beginning as the Southwestern Association of Petroleum Geologists in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about 90 geologists gathered at Henry Kendall College, now Tulsa University, and on on February 10, 1917, formed an association “to which only reputable and recognized petroleum geologists are admitted.”

AAPG embraces a code that assures “the integrity, business ethics, personal honor, and professional conduct” of its worldwide membership.

The new association’s mission included promoting the science of geology, especially as it related to oil and natural gas, and encourage “technology improvements in the methods of exploring for and exploiting these substances.”

AAPG would also “foster the spirit of scientific research among its members; to disseminate facts relating to the geology and technology of petroleum and natural gas.”

Adopted its present name a year after the meeting at Henry Kendall College, AAPG begins publishing a bimonthly journal that remains among the most respected in the industry.

AAPG launches a peer-reviewed Bulletin that includes papers written by leading geologists. With a subscription price of five dollars, the journal is distributed to members, university libraries, and other industry professionals. Read the rest of this entry »

“There’s an oil spill every day off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, where oil is seeping naturally from cracks in the seafloor into the ocean,” notes the the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In 1969, an oil spill from a California offshore platform will lead to creation of the modern environmental movement. Today, some Santa Barbara County residents want to lift the state’s drilling ban – to reduce the relentless flow of the region’s underwater natural oil seeps.

“The techniques, equipment and resources necessary to combat an oil spill of this magnitude did not exist at the time,” notes one expert about the 1969 well blowout.

On January 28, after drilling 3,500 below the ocean floor, a Union Oil Company drilling platform six miles off Santa Barbara, suffered a blowout.

Between 80,000 barrels and 100,000 barrels of oil flowed into the Pacific Ocean and onto beaches, including Summerland – where the U.S. offshore industry began in 1896 with wells drilled from piers.

Problems at the Union Oil platform began when roughnecks began to retrieve the pipe in order to replace a drill bit and pressure became dangerously low,  according to a report by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

“A natural gas blowout occurred. An initial attempt to cap the hole was successful but led to a tremendous buildup of pressure. The expanding mass created five breaks in an east-west fault on the ocean floor, releasing oil and gas from deep beneath the earth,” UCSB noted. Read the rest of this entry »

Oil scouts like Justus McMullen often braved harsh winters (and sometimes armed guards) to visit well sites. Their intelligence debunked rumors and “demystified” reports about oil wells producing in early oil fields.

In the hard winter of 1888, famed 37-year-old “oil scout” Justus C. McMullen, succumbs to pneumonia – contracted while scouting production data from the Pittsburgh Manufacturers’ Gas Company’s well at Cannonsburg.

McMullen, publisher of the Bradford, Pennsylvania, “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a reliable the oil field detective. Read the rest of this entry »

Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum, operated by Lamar University in Beaumont, is a 15-building complex, which re-creates Gladys City, an early 1900s era boomtown on the historic Spindletop oil field. The museum provides services to the public, including school tours, adult group tours, teachers’ workshops – and gusher re-enactments.

The Beaumont, Texas, museum includes 15 buildings of exhibits to educate visitors.

On January 1, 1901, if you asked residents of Beaumont, Texas, what news interested them, they would have said the Galveston Hurricane of September 8 (the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history), or the dawning of a new century.

However, as a southeastern Texas petroleum museum explains, if you asked them after January 10, 1901 – they would have said the great oil gusher on Spindletop Hill.

The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont tells the story of the Spindletop well, a discovery that created the greatest oil boom in America – exceeding the nation’s first oil discovery well in 1859 in Pennsylvania.

Just as consumer demand for kerosene for lamps was declining in favor of electricity, Americans would soon want far more of another refined petroleum product: gasoline. Within a few decades, new oil companies will pump gasoline into automobiles from “filling stations” across the country.

Once a popular view in Beaumont’s Dixie Hotel: “Spindletop Viewing Her Gusher,” 1903, pastel on linen, by Aaron Arion.

According to museum Curator Christy Marino, Texaco and Gulf got their start in the Beaumont area oilfields. Humble (now ExxonMobil) began at the at the nearby town of Humble.

Also known as the “Lucas Gusher” after Captain Anthony F. Lucas, a mining engineer who drilled on a hill, the oilfield produced 3.59 million barrels in its first year and an incredible 17.4 million barrels the next.

The discovery near the southeastern Texas Gulf Coast defied predictions of other earth scientists.

As a result of Spindletop, “Christmas trees” to control oil wells became commonplace in the industry. The Texas discovery “changed the way people would live all over the world,” proclaimed Houston oilman Michel T. Halbouty in 1952. “It revived the industrial revolution…caused the United States to become a world power…(and) revolutionized transportation through the automobile industry.”

Texas oil production also would help bring an end to John D. Rockefeller’s oil monopolies. In 1936 – fifteen years after Lucas died – the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (founded in 1871) began awarding its Anthony F. Lucas Medal to recognize “distinguished achievements in improving the technique and practice of finding and producing petroleum.”

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Spindletop creates the modern oil and natural gas industry, changes the future of American industry and transportation – and brings many new oilfield technologies.

The discovery well’s story – which popularizes rotary drilling technology – begins more than a decade earlier when the Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company is formed by Patillo Higgins. Higgins, a one-armed mechanic and self-taught geologist, is one of the few at the time who believes U.S. industries will soon switch fuels from coal to oil.

The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont, Texas, tells the story of one of America’s greatest petroleum discoveries, the “Lucas Gusher” of January 10, 1901. The Spindletop field will produce more oil in one day than the rest of the world’s oilfields combined.

Higgins is convinced that the “Big Hill” four miles south of Beaumont has oil — despite conventional wisdom to the contrary. Through the latter half of the 19th century, Pennsylvania had been the most oil-productive state in the country, notes an article by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI). Texas had produced only minor amounts of oil, starting with a well in 1866 drilled by Lyne T. Barret near the East Texas town of Nacogdoches.

Patillo Higgins forms the Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company on August 24, 1892.

Formed over millions of years, the hill near Beaumont is the result of a giant underground dome of salt that moved towards the surface, explains the article. Higgins had a feeling that drilling a well on top of this salt dome would produce oil.

“The Texas press, as well as the local geologists, had been very skeptical of Higgins for years, and no one in the area believed that a salt dome structure could produce oil,” the article says.

The Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company drills wells on Spindletop in 1893, 1895 and 1896. All are dry holes.

Higgins, who will leave the venture, hires a Croatian mining engineer. Anthony Lucas (Antun Lucic, born in 1855). Lucas has studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, and served as a captain in the Austrian navy. He recently has been a salt miner in Louisiana.

Capt. Anthony Lucas, a Croatian mining engineer and former officer in the Austrian navy.

I  went to Beaumont, Texas, about seventy miles west of Lafayette. There I was attracted by an elevation, then known locally as Big Hill, although this hill amounted merely to a mound rising only twelve feet above the level of the prairie.

This mound attracted my attention on account of its contour, which indicated possibilities for an incipient dome below, and because at the apex of it there were exudations of sulphuretted hydrogen gas. — Capt. Lucas quote from an article by Adam S. Eterovich.

Lucas contacts famed Pennsylvania oilman John Galey and his partner James Guffey, who had drilled marginally successful wells in nearby Corsicana in 1896. Galey and Guffey had returned to Pennsylvania, convinced that there was little future in Texas oil.

“Lucas turned to Guffey and Galey, who had left the area three years earlier,” the PRI article continues. “Something made them change their minds, and in 1900, John Galey returned to Beaumont, Texas, to survey the area. He picked the spot, and the drilling began on October 27, 1900.”

Technological advances from drilling at Spindletop “paved the way for other oil producing states like California to increase their production.” Early major oil companies like Texaco, Gulf, Mobile, Humble and Sun Oil trace their roots to the “Big Hill.”

Drilling is difficult at first. “There is little in the way of rock at the surface in that part of the world. Instead, oil wildcatters had to drill through several hundred feet of sand,” the article notes. “This made the hole prone to cave in on them. To help solve this problem, one of Lucas’s drillers, Curt Hamill, came up with a solution that was revolutionary at the time.”

Instead of pumping water down the hole to flush out the cuttings produced by the action of the drill, Hamill used mud. “This proved to help not only in retrieving the cuttings, but just as importantly, it was found that the mud stuck to the sides of the hole and kept it from caving in, explains the PRI article. “It was found there were even more benefits, and mud has been used in almost every drill hole around the world ever since.”

“On this spot on the tenth day of the twentieth century a new era in civilization began,” notes an inscription on the 25-foot-tall monument erected in 1941 — and today part of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum’s outdoor exhibits.

The “Lucas Gusher” will erupt more than 150 feet into the air. It begins flowing at an astounding 100,000 barrels per day from a depth of 1,010 feet. I

This is the first discovery of the prolific salt dome structures along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The well is not brought under control for nine days, losing an estimated 850,000 barrels of oil. According to PRI, a new device – now called a “Christmas Tree” – is invented on the spot to control the flow of oil.

The Spindletop field will soon produce more oil in one day than all the rest of the world’s oilfields combined. In its first year alone Spindletop produced 3.59 million barrels of oil — climbing to 17.4 million by its second year. The huge amount of oil causes the price of oil to drop from $2 to less than 25 cents a barrel. Texaco, Gulf, Mobile, Humble and Sun oil companies can trace their roots to the Big Hill.

“Technological advances engineered in Texas during this early period paved the way for other oil producing states like California to increase their production,” concludes Vintage Oil, a website that sells photographs.

“Fishtail drilling bits gave way to the Hughes Tool rotary rock bit.” the site adds. “The movers and shakers of the oil industry converged on Houston in the early 1900s and the city still reigns today as the energy capital of the world.”

The Spindletop discovery “affected the entire world,” proclaims Michel T. Halbouty, a legendary Houston oilman who co-authored the 1952 book Spindletop: the True Story of the Oil Discovery That Changed the World.

“It changed the way people would live all over the world,” Halbouty explains. “It revived the industrial revolution, which had been dead for a while. It caused the United States to become a world power. It revolutionized transportation through the automobile industry. It started the Liquid Fuel Age, the greatest age in the history of the world.”

Two Beaumont museums tell the story of the Spindletop discovery — and today’s role of the petroleum industry in America’s economic development. Visit the Texas Energy Museum and the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — where educational water-gusher demonstrations occur.

Read about salt domes in “Offshore Oil History.” Learn more about Texas exploration history in “First Lone Star Discovery.”

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It’s the first of a series of nuclear denotations conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission to test the feasibility of using nuclear explosions to release natural gas trapped in dense shale deposits. This is “fracking,” late 1960s style.  

In December 1967, government scientists – exploring the peacetime use of controlled atomic explosions – detonate Gasbuggy, a 29-kiloton nuclear device they had lowered into a natural gas well in rural New Mexico. The Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons.

Scientists lower a 13-foot by 18-inches diameter nuclear warhead into a well in New Mexico. The experimental 29-kiloton Project Gasbuggy device will be detonated at a depth of 4,240 feet. Los Alamos Lab photo.

Project Gasbuggy included experts from the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Bureau of Mines and El Paso Natural Gas Company. Near three low-production natural gas wells, the team drilled to a depth of 4,240 feet – and lowered a 13-foot-long by 18-inch-wide nuclear device into the borehole. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 1896, when the first commercial oil well was drilled in Bartlesville, many historic Oklahoma oilfields have been discovered: Glennpool, Cushing, Three Sands, Healdton, Oklahoma City and others – including 20 “giants.” Few have had the tremendous economic impact as the late 1920s oilfields of the greater Seminole area. 

Prosperity brought traffic jams to Seminole, Oklahoma, in the mid-1920s when newly discovered oilfields “swung the United States’ oil inventory from scarcity to surplus.” Photo courtesy the Oklahoma Oil Museum.

A July 16, 1926, discovery well near Seminole, Oklahoma, revealed the massive potential of an oil producing formation, the Wilcox sand –  and launched a drilling boom that will make Oklahoma one of today’s leading producing states. The Fixico No. 1 well penetrated the Wilcox sand at 4,073 feet.

By 1935, the oilfields around Seminole became the largest supplier of oil in the world. More than 60 petroleum reservoirs were found in 1,300 square miles of east-central Oklahoma – and six were “giants,” producing more than million barrels of oil each. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1878, two brothers will discover a massive natural gas field, help bring a new energy resource to Pittsburgh – and lay the foundation for several modern petroleum companies.

Like many young men of their time, Michael Haymaker and his younger brother Obediah left their Westmoreland County farm to seek their fortunes in Pennsylvania’s booming petroleum industry. Read the rest of this entry »

October 23, 1908 – Oil Boom arrives in Wyoming

A postcard from Midwest, Wyoming, pictures the Salt Creek oil boom. Production continues today thanks to new technologies.

Wyoming’s first oil boom begins when the Dutch-owned Petroleum Maatschappij Salt Creek brings in the “Big Dutch” well – a gusher about 40 miles north of Casper.

Although the Salt Creek area was known to be productive, the central Salt Creek dome received little attention until noted Italian geologist Dr. Cesare Porro recommended the drilling site to Petroleum Maaschappij in 1906.

Drillers J. E. Stock and his father, working for an English corporation known as the Oil Wells Drilling Syndicate, brought in the well at 1050 feet with initial production of 600 barrels a day.

More than 4,000 wells have since been drilled in the Salt Creek oilfield, producing from depths of 22 to 4,500 feet. The field has ten producing zones. To increase production, water-flooding began in the 1960s and carbon dioxide injection in 2004. In 2007, the field produced almost three million barrels of oil. Read more in “Petroleum Pioneers of Wyoming.”

October 23, 1948 – Pipeline Inspection Technology advances

Photo of a “smart pig” used for testing pipelines courtesy of Pacific L.A. Marine Terminal.

Northern Natural Gas Company records the first use of an X-ray machine for internal testing of petroleum pipeline welds.

The company examines a 20-inch diameter pipe north its Clifton, Kansas, compressor station. The device – now known as a “smart pig” – travels up to 1,800 feet inside the pipe, imaging each weld.

As early as 1926, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory had investigated the use of gamma-ray radiation to detect flaws in welded steel and in 1944, Cormack Boucher patented an “Industrial Radiographic Apparatus” described as “particularly suitable for radio-graphing annular welds in relatively large diameter cylindrical structures.”

Modern inspection tools may employ magnetic particle, ultrasonic, eddy current, and other inspection methods to verify pipeline and weld integrity. Read the rest of this entry »

Among its records for dry holes, Florida’s first – but certainly not last – unsuccessful attempt to find commercially viable oil reserves began in 1901, not far from the Gulf Coast panhandle town of Pensacola.

Florida’s first oil well’s site is by present day Big Cypress Preserve in southwest Florida, about a 30 minute drive from the resort city of Naples — where a museum exhibit describes the discovery.

Two test wells were drilled, the first to 1,620 feet and the second a hundred feet deeper. Both were abandoned. Whether that wildcatter was following science or intuition, contemporary accounts of his efforts reveal only a small historical footnote: “Florida’s first dry holes.”

Twenty years later, as America’s oil demand continued to soar, oil still had not been found in Florida. The state’s panhandle still looked promising – despite a growing list of failed drilling ventures.

Indian legends and a wildcat stock promoter’s claim of oil inspired yet another attempt near today’s Falling Waters Park, about 100 miles east of Pensacola. A tall, wooden derrick and steam-driven rig were used to drill.

At a depth 3,900 feet, a brief showing of natural gas excited area residents with a false report of a possible gusher. Undeterred, the oilmen continued to drill to a depth of 4,912 feet before finally giving up.

No oil of commercial quantity was found and the well was capped in 1921. Another dry hole. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boy Scouts of America geology merit badge began in 1911 as a mining badge – one of less than 30 scouting merit badges. The mining badge evolved into the rocks and minerals badge and in 1953 became the geology merit badge.

Read the rest of this entry »