by Bruce Wells | May 5, 2025 | This Week in Petroleum History
May 5, 1889 – Construction begins on Giant Refinery –
On the southern shore of Lake Michigan near Chicago, Standard Oil Company began construction of its 235-acre refinery complex with advanced processing technologies. A newly patented refining method would allow the Standard Oil Whiting, Indiana, facility to process sulfurous “sour crude” from Lima, Ohio, oilfields. The oil would be transported on railroads owned or operated by the company. The Whiting refinery (today operated by BP) originally produced high-quality kerosene for lamps. BP completed a multi-year, multi-billion dollar modernization project there in 2013.
Learn more in Standard Oil Whiting Refinery.
May 5, 1907 – A Marker to North Texas Petroleum History
Outside Oil City (today Petrolia), Texas, the Clayco Oil & Pipe Line Company completed its Lochridge No.1 well, “site of the first gas well in Texas,” according to a granite marker that credits local rancher J.W. Lochridge for the discovery east of Wichita Falls.
“This discovery marked the beginning of intensive development of the gas industry in Texas,” the marker explains. Lochridge had been disappointed with a 1901 well that produced some oil, which he used in his dipping vats to rid his cattle of parasites, according to a 2016 article in North Texas Farm & Ranch.
Clayco Oil & Pipe Line Company commemorated its 1907 discovery in North Texas with a marker that has endured near Highway 148 south of Petrolia.
The Clayco Oil & Pipe Line Company marker in the Henrietta-Petrolia field acknowledges Lone Star Gas Company for constructing the state’s first large-diameter natural gas pipeline in 1920 to Fort Worth and Dallas. Lone Star Gas changed its name to Enserch Corporation in 1975.
May 7, 1920 – Halliburton founds Well Cementing Company
As mid-continent oil and gas discoveries continued, Erle Palmer Halliburton founded the Halliburton Company as an oilfield well service and cementing company. The Wilson, Oklahoma, venture succeeded his New Method Oil Cementing Company, established a year earlier during the Burkburnett oil boom in North Texas.
An Erle P. Halliburton statue was dedicated in 1993 in Duncan, Oklahoma.
In 1922, Halliburton patented an innovative “jet-cement” mixer that increased the speed and quality of the mixing process. By the end of the year, 17 Halliburton trucks were cementing wells in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Cement injection protects the well casing, seals off water formations from the oil, and minimizes the danger of blowouts.
The company introduced cement pumps powered by truck motors (instead of steam from the rig boiler) and a device that allowed testing of a formation without setting casing. Halliburton was the first to offer self-contained cementing units operating under their own power. More advances in cementing technology followed.
Learn more in Halliburton cements Wells.
May 8, 1918 – Shreveport Gassers go Extra Innings
As baseball became America’s favorite pastime, the Texas League’s Shreveport Gassers played 20 innings against the Fort Worth Panthers before the game was declared a tie. The Gassers were just one of many oilfield-related teams in the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, today known as Minor League Baseball.
Former Olinda Oil Wells pitcher Walter Johnson joined Babe Ruth for a 1924 exhibition game at Brea, California.
At the time, the leagues’ 96 teams included the Okmulgee Drillers, the Tulsa Oilers, the Independence Producers, the Beaumont Exporters, the Corsicana Oil Citys, the Wichita Falls Spudders, and the Iola Gasbags. In Oklahoma oilfields, the Okmulgee Drillers for the first time in baseball history had two players who combined to hit 100 home runs in a single season of 160 games.
Learn more in Oilfields of Dreams.
May 8, 1920 – Burbank field discovered in Oklahoma
Drilling for natural gas 20 miles east of Ponca City, Oklahoma, the Kay County Gas Company’s Bertha Hickman No. 1 well revealed a giant oilfield. Marland Oil & Refining Company assumed control of the discovery well, which produced 150 barrels of oil a day from a depth of about 3,000 feet. The Burbank field would extend over 33 square miles, mostly in Osage County, and produce between 20 million and 31 million barrels of oil annually for the next four years.
E.W. Marland in 1928 built his Ponca City mansion, now a museum. Fellow Oklahoman Will Rogers was a frequent guest.
With Oklahoma petroleum production booming since the Red Fork Gusher of 1901, independent producers agreed to use a 10-acre well spacing for oil conservation. Ernest W. Marland (Oklahoma governor from 1935 to 1939) applied new seismography technologies to discover the Tonkawa oilfield in June 1921. Visit the Marland Estate in Ponca City.
May 9, 1863 – Confederate Cavalry raids Oilfield
Confederate cavalry attacked a thriving oil town near the Ohio River in what would soon become West Virginia. Confederate Gen. William “Grumble” Jones led the rebel cavalry brigade raid on Burning Springs oilfield storage facilities containing thousands of barrels of oil.
Rebels attacked the Burning Springs oilfield on the banks of the Little Kanawha River, just a few miles southeast of Parkersburg and the Ohio River. Heritage district map courtesy Oil & Gas Museum, Parkersburg, West Virginia.
About 1,300 Confederate troopers raided Burning Springs, destroying cable-tools and burning 150,000 barrels of oil. “All the oil, the tanks, barrels, engines for pumping, engine-houses, and wagons — in a word, everything used for raising, holding, or sending it off was burned,” Gen. Jones reported to Gen. Robert E. Lee. The destruction and fires along the Kanawha River marked the first time an oilfield was targeted in warfare, according to West Virginia historian David McKain.
Learn more in Confederates attack Oilfield.
May 11, 1880 – Dresser patents Oil Well Device
Solomon R. Dresser of Bradford, Pennsylvania, patented a rubber “packer” for sealing downhole pressure in wells. The technology behind the patent (no. 227419) helped confine gas, “which enters the well from the lower rocks and utilizes its force or pressure to expel the oil from the well.”
Detail from Solomon R. Dresser 1880 patent for a rubber “packer” to seal downhole pressure in wells.
With the success of his Dresser “Cap Packer” in the giant Bradford oilfield, the inventor founded the S.R. Dresser Manufacturing Company. In 1885, he patented a flexible coupling known as a “Dresser Joint,” a widely adopted pipeline coupling method using rubber for tight seals, which permitted long-range transmission of natural gas.
After expanding into manufacturing oilfield pumps, engines, and compressors, Dresser’s company went public in 1928, moving its headquarters from Bradford to Dallas in 1950. Dresser Industries merged with oilfield supply rival Halliburton for about $7.7 billion in stock in 1998.
Recommended Reading: Erle P. Halliburton, Genius with Cement
(1959); Oil in Oklahoma
(1976); Textile League Baseball: South Carolina’s Mill Teams, 1880-1955
(2004); The Civil War and Northwestern Virginia
(2004); Conoco: 125 Years of Energy
(2000); Phillips, The First 66 Years
(1983). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
by Bruce Wells | Apr 30, 2025 | Petroleum Products
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil scientists patented the “thermal cracking” process.
Beginning in the 1890s, the Whiting refinery of Standard Oil Company of Indiana first produced kerosene for lamps and later gasoline for autos to meet growing consumer demand.
Seventeen miles east of Chicago, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey began construction on a massive refinery complex in early May 1889. Using advanced refining processes introduced by John D. Rockefeller, it would become the largest in the United States.
BP completed a multi-year, multi-billion dollar modernization project at the Whiting refinery in 2013. Photo courtesy Hydrocarbon Processing magazine.
Once operated by Amoco, the refinery in Whiting, Indiana, was acquired by the British Petroleum Company in 1998 as part of its $48.2 billion merger with Amoco. After the acquisition, British Petroleum became BP Amoco, a name shorted to BP in 2001 after mergers with ARCO and Castrol.
The BP brand also used a lower-case bp often with the tagline “beyond petroleum” and a stylized yellow and green sun. By 2023 — and after federally mandated environmental improvements — the 1,400-acre Whiting plant refined about 435,000 barrels of oil per day.
Refining “Sour Crude”
About one month after construction of the then 235-acre refinery began, Rockefeller established a locally based subsidiary by incorporating Standard Oil Company of Indiana on June 18, 1889. The new company began processing oil at its Whiting refinery within a year.
In its early years, the Indiana refinery processed a sulfurous “sour crude” from the Lima, Ohio, oilfields — transported on Rockefeller-controlled railroads. Most Americans, already putting out their tallow candles to buy lamps fueled with whale oil, lard, or the less costly but volatile camphene, embraced a new fuel — “rock oil” soon brought skyrocketing public demand.
Rockefeller had purchased considerable amounts of production from the Lima oilfield at bargain prices. Most experts in the new petroleum industry believed the thick oil worthless. It could not be refined for a profit. The Whiting refinery, using a newly patented method, efficiently processed Ohio sour oil into high-quality kerosene.
Although gasoline was a minor by-product, two brothers in Massachusetts were building a gasoline-powered horseless carriage at about the time the refinery produced its first 125 railroad tank cars filled with kerosene. The gas-powered automobile helped relaunch the petroleum industry — see Cantankerous Combustion – 1st U.S. Auto Show.
The Standard Oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, became the company’s most productive. Owned by BP since 1998, it has remained the largest U.S. refinery. Whiting has been home to the Northwest Indiana Oilmen since 2012.
“By the mid-1890s, the Whiting plant had become the largest refinery in the United States, handling 36,000 barrels of oil per day and accounting for nearly 20 percent of the total U.S. refining capacity,” noted historian Mark R. Wilson in the Encyclopedia of Chicago. It initially consisted of just a single facility.
Crude oil was processed into products that people and businesses needed: axle grease for industrial machinery, paraffin wax for candles, and kerosene for home lighting.
“The company grew. By the early 1900s it was the leading provider of kerosene and gasoline in the Midwest” noted Wilson on the website. “Kerosene sales would eventually falter. But with car ownership booming across the United States, demand for gasoline would only go up and up.”
More Midwest Refineries
By 1910, the refinery was connected by pipeline to oilfields in Kansas and Oklahoma, as well as Ohio and Indiana. The Whiting facility employed 2,400 workers a year later when Rockefeller was forced to break up his petroleum empire. Standard Oil of Indiana, with offices in downtown Chicago, emerged as an independent company.
Rockefeller’s Whiting scientists earlier had patented the process they called “thermal cracking” that doubled the amount of gasoline made from a barrel of oil and also boosted the octane rating. Crude oil hydrocarbons were subjected to high heat, “breaking down long-chained, higher-boiling hydrocarbons into shorter-chained, lower-boiling hydrocarbons,” according to Science Direct.
Standard Oil’s revolutionary process, which became standard practice in the refining industry, helped avert a gasoline shortage during World War I. To find its own oil supplies, Standard Oil of Indiana began its own exploration and production business, Stanolind.
In 1922, Standard Oil absorbed the American Oil Company, founded in Baltimore in 1910, and began branding products as Amoco, which later would become its company name. By 1952, Amoco was ranked as the largest domestic oil company.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the U.S. refining industry became more concentrated in Texas, Louisiana, and California.
“The Chicago region became somewhat less important as an oil-processing center than it had been during the previous 60 years,” historian Mark Wilson concluded. “Still, the area remained home to some large refineries. The largest of these plants was the one at Whiting – the same facility that had brought refining to Chicago in 1890.”
Across the border from Indiana, three major Illinois refineries also process oil in the Chicago area. At the end of 2024, the Citgo refinery in Lemont processed 177,000 barrels of oil a day; the Joliet refinery owned by ExxonMobil processed 270,000 barrels of oil a day; and the Robinson refinery of Marathon Petroleum reported a daily capacity for 253,000 barrels of oil. A fourth refinery in southern Illinois was constructed in 1918 by Shell.
The BP Whiting Refinery on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan in 2024 processed 346,500 barrels of oil daily into millions of gallons of gasoline/fuel — and thousands of barrels of asphalt.
The smaller Wood River Refinery has its own museum.
Wood River Refining Museum
Fifteen miles north of St. Louis, Missouri, the Wood River Refinery at Roxana, Illinois, can boast of its own museum. The refinery is owned by Phillips 66 and the Canadian company Cenovus Energy.
“The Wood River Refinery History Museum is located in front of the refinery on Highway 111 in Wood River, Illinois,” the museum notes. “There are four buildings in our complex, so to see most of our collection, plan on spending some time.”
Meanwhile, the historic Whiting refinery has supported a baseball team — the Northwest Indiana Oilmen, one of eight teams in the Midwest Collegiate League, a pre-minor league (see more petroleum-related baseball teams in Oilfields of Dreams).
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Recommended Reading: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
(2004); Whiting and Robertsdale – Images of America
(2013). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
_______________________
The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Standard Oil Whiting Refinery.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/products/standard-oil-whiting-refinery. Last Updated: May 2, 2025. Original Published Date: June 15, 2013.
