Downhole Bazooka

World War II anti-tank weapon improved technologies for perforating well casing.

 

Swiss inventor Henry Mohaupt used his experience from creating a World War II anti-tank weapon to develop a new technology for improving production of oil and natural gas wells. To improve perforating well casing, he used conically hollowed-out explosive charges to focus each detonation’s energy.

(more…)

First Dry Hole

America’s first unsuccessful well drilled for oil still achieved many petroleum industry “firsts.”

 

Today’s oil and natural gas exploration and production technologies began with mid-19th century wells drilled in northwestern Pennsylvania. Just four days after America’s first commercial oil well, a second attempt nearby resulted in the first “dry hole” for the new U.S. petroleum industry.

Edwin L. Drake drilled the first U.S. oil well specifically seeking oil on August 27, 1859, at Titusville, Pennsylvania. His historic feat included inventing the method of driving a pipe downhole to protect the integrity of the well bore. The former railroad conductor borrowed a kitchen water pump to produce the first barrel of oil.

(more…)

Oilfield Firefighting Technologies

In this flammable workplace, danger can come from anywhere, including the sky.

 

Whether ignited by accident, natural phenomena, or acts of war, oilfield fires have challenged America’s petroleum industry since the earliest wells. Catastrophic fires have threatened the search for oil and natural gas since the first U.S. oil well, completed on August 27, 1859, along a Pennsylvania creek.

Just six weeks after his discovery, Edwin L. Drake’s well caught fire when driller William “Uncle Billy” Smith inspected the well with an open lamp, igniting seeping natural gas. Flames consumed the cable-tool derrick, engine-pump house, stored oil, and Smith’s nearby shack.

Drake oil well drilling rig at museum.

Drake Well Museum exhibits in Titusville, Pennsylvania, include a replica of the cable-tool derrick and engine house that drilled the first U.S. well in 1859.

Today, visitors to the Drake Well Museum at Titusville tour the latest reconstructed cable-tool derrick and its engine house along Oil Creek where the former railroad conductor found oil at a depth of 69.5 feet. He revealed a geologic formation later called the Venango sandstone.

Another Drake Well Museum exhibit preserves the Titusville Fire Department’s coal-fired steam pumper (see Oilfield Photographer John Mather). As the new U.S. petroleum industry learned from hard experience, firefighting technologies evolved in northwestern Pennsylvania’s “Valley that Changed the World.”  

Early Firefighting Lessons

In 1861, an explosion and fire at Henry Rouse’s gushing oil well made national news when he was killed along with 18 workers and onlookers (see Rouseville 1861 Oil Well Fire).  In 1977, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired landscape artist James Hamilton’s “Burning Oil Well at Night, near Rouseville, Pennsylvania,” painted soon after the fire.

The dangerous operating environment of a cable-tool rig included a spinning bull wheel, a rising and falling heavy wooden beam, a steam boiler, and crowded spaces.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

The pounding iron drill bit frequently needed to be withdrawn and hammered sharp using a small, but red-hot forge — often set up just feet from the wellbore.

Lighting striking derricks and oilfield tank farms also would prove challenging.

Painting of Rouseville fire of 1861. James Hamilton's Burning Oil Well at Night, near Rouseville, Pennsylvania, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Preserved by the Smithsonian, “Burning Oil Well at Night, near Rouseville, Pennsylvania,” circa 1861, a paining by James Hamilton, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Late 19th century oilfield fire prevention remained rudimentary as exploration moved westward. Safety lamps like one with two spouts popularly known as the “Yellow Dog” lantern, were not particularly safe. The rapidly growing petroleum industry needed new technologies for preventing fires or putting them out.

As drilling experience grew, refineries responded to skyrocketing public demand for the lamp fuel kerosene. Production from new oilfields in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma led to construction of safer storage facilities, but advances in drilling deeper wells brought fresh challenges (see Ending Oil Gushers – BOP).

Firefighting with Cannons

Especially in early oilfields, working in such a flammable workplace could bring danger from everywhere — including the sky. Lightning strikes to wooden storage tanks created flaming cauldrons.

Cannon shoots burning oil tank, circa 1915.

A circa 1915 photo of a cannon — possibly a “Model 1819,” according to The Artilleryman Magazine (Fall 2019, vol. 40, no. 4) — firing solid shot in an attempt to create a hole to drain the burning oil tank. “No one appears to be near the gun, so it may have been fired using fuse or electrically.” Photo courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.

In the rush to exploit early oilfields, wooden derricks often crowded an oil-soaked landscape, leaving workers — and nearby towns — dangerously exposed to an accidental conflagration. Many oil patch community oil museums have retained examples of early smooth-bore cannon used to fight fires.

A civil-war era field cannon exhibit in Corsicana, Texas, tells the story of a cannon from the Magnolia Petroleum Company tank farm. “It was used to shoot a hole in the bottom of the cypress tanks if lightning struck,” a plaque notes. “The oil would drain into a pit around the tanks and be pumped away.”

Learn more in Oilfield Artillery fights Fires.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

Oilfield firefighting using cannons has continued into the 21st century. In May 2020, a well operated by the Irkutsk Oil Company in Russia’s Siberian region ignited a geyser of flaming oil and natural gas. When efforts to control the blowout failed, the Russian Defense Ministry flew in a 1970s era anti-tank gun and its Hungarian crew.

From about 200 yards away, the Hungarian artillerymen (Covid-19 masked) repeatedly fired their 100-millimeter, smooth-bore Rapira MT-12 gun at blazing oilfield equipment, “breaking it from the well and allowing crews to seal the well,” according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

In addition to using cannons to fire well fires, other techniques have included smothering them using cranes to lower iron metal caps (see Kansas Gas Well Fire) or detonating an explosive from above  to rob the flames of air. Using a wind machine must count among the more unusual methods.

Firefighting with Wind

In 1929, about 400 volunteers took on a raging oilfield fire that had destroyed seven derricks and two oil well “heavy producers” at Santa Fe Springs, California. “Roaring Flames Turn Black Gold To Smoke,” proclaimed a Los Angeles Times headline on June 12.

The Santa Fe Springs Hathaway Ranch and Oil Museum, “a museum of five generations of Hathaway family and Southern California history,” has preserved rare motion picture clips of a propeller-driven “Wind-making Machine” in action — although the wind proved no match for the flames.

WInd machine for fighting oilfield fires at Hathaway Ranch and Oil Museum.

“The machine that made the wind that conquered a fire in a Santa Fe Springs oilfield on June 15, 1929,” used a three-bladed airplane propeller and a powerful motor to blow heat away from the men at work fighting the fire. “A track of boards was built for the machine over a lake of oil, mud and water in the ‘hot zone’ of the big fire.” — Hathaway Ranch and Oil Museum, Santa Fe Springs, California.

The fire depicted in the silent film is intense, “so firefighting equipment is appropriately distant from the well head, including the wind machine,” explained museum Curator of Media Archives Terry Hathaway.

“It looks like its use is more or less limited to blowing hot air, smoke and steam (from firefighting water hoses) away from the workers and toward the fire,” he added.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

Hathaway explained that the wind machine on the back of a truck probably had no direct influence on the fire itself, due to distance and the ferocity of the high-pressure well blowout, “but it apparently may have made things more tenable for the firefighters by keeping them relatively cool and smoke free.”

A modern version of the 1929 wind-making machine returned in 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s retreating Iraqi army set hundreds of wells ablaze in Kuwait oilfields. Firefighting technologies by then had evolved into using jet engines. MB Drilling Company of Szolnok, Hungary, sent a three-man team with “Big Wind,” a modern version of the 1929 wind-making machine.

Instead of a piston-driven propeller on a vintage truck bed, twin MIG-21 turbojets were mounted in place of the turret on a World War II era Soviet T-34 tank. The jet engines generated 700 mph of thrust, which blasted hundreds of gallons of water per second into the flames.

Russian "Big Windy" dual jet engine wind machine.

Image from Romanian video of 1991 Kuwaiti oilfields: “Twin MIG-21 turbojets mounted on a World War II era Soviet T-34 tank dubbed “Big Wind” generated 700 mph thrust blasting hundreds of gallons of water per second into the fire.”

The Hungarian  team members put out their assigned fires and recapped nine wells in 43 days, according to a 2001 Car and Driver article, “Stilling the Fires of War.”

Firefighting with Explosives

Many firefighting teams went to Kuwait following the Persian Gulf War, including Paul “Red” Adair, whose dramatic oilfield feats had been popularized in the 1968 movie “Hellfighters.” Adair and his team extinguished 117 Kuwaiti oil well fires by robbing the flames of oxygen using explosives.

As the Hungarian crew chief of “Big Wind” observed at the time, “Would you really want to walk up to a 2,000-degree flame through burning heat and oil rain carrying explosives?”

A century earlier, Karl T. Kinley did just that. Kinley, a California oil well “shooter” (see Shooters — A History of Fracking) during the early 1900s, learned from first-hand experience that a dynamite explosion could “blow out” a wellhead fire. Kinley’s son Myron Macy Kinley established the pioneering oilfield service business M.M. Kinley Company after learning from his father’s highly dangerous experiments.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

Readers Digest in 1953 declared Myron M. Kinley “the unrivaled world-champion fighter of oil fires.” A TIME article described him as “the indispensable man of the oil industry.”

But with chance of terrible injuries or death ever present, firefighting success was not without cost. Kinley’s brother Floyd was killed by falling rig debris in 1938 as they fought a runaway well fire near Goliad, Texas. 

Myron M. Kinley, Paul "Red Adair and a welder examine a nitroglycerin bomb barrel.

Myron M. Kinley (at left), Paul “Red Adair (center), and a welder examine a nitroglycerin bomb barrel. Myron Kinley has been called the grandfather of modern oil well fire fighting, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. Photo by A.Y. Owen courtesy OHS Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection.

Kinley, a mentor of “Red” Adair, developed technologies at M.M. Kinley Company that inspired other firefighting experts, including Joe R. Bowden Sr., who founded Wild Well Control in 1975 to provide emergency response, safety training, and relief well engineering, and Bobby Joe Cudd, who established Woodward, Oklahoma-based Cudd Well Control Company in 1977 with eight employees and a “hydraulic snubbing unit.”

After they had worked for the Red Adair Service and Marine Company, Asger “Boots” Hansen and “Coots” Mathews in 1978 opened an office in Houston for what could become Boots & Coots International Well Control (today a Halliburton Company).

Adair had joined Myron Kinley’s California oilfield service company after serving with a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit during World War II. After starting his own company by 1959, “Red” improved firefighting technologies, developing new tools, equipment, and techniques for “wild well” control.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

Adair was 75 years old when he successfully tamed roaring fires in Kuwait’s scorched oilfields. As early as 1962, his Red Adair Company had “put out a Libyan oil well fire that had burned so brightly that astronaut John Glenn could see it from space,” the Los Angeles Times reported. 

Firefighting with Nukes

Between 1966 and 1981, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics snuffed out runaway fires at natural gas wells using subsurface nuclear detonations. The experiments, part of the broader “Program No. 7 – Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy,” imitated a U.S. initiative, “Plowshare,” seeking peaceful uses of nuclear bombs.

According to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USSR scientists code-named five secret attempts Urta-Bulak, Pamuk, Crater, Fakel, and Pyrite.

The first experimental detonation, Urta-Bulak in 1966, came after three-years and failed conventional attempts to extinguish a blazing natural gas well in Southern Uzbekistan. Scientists positioned a special 30-kiloton package within 300 feet of the borehole by slant drilling.

Detonated in clay strata at a depth of 4,921 feet, the nuclear explosion’s shock wave sealed the well within 23 seconds, staunching the daily waste of 423 million cubic feet of natural gas, reported Russian television.

Workers lower nuke into USSR well in 1966.

Video image showing USSR nuclear device being lowered into well for detonation shockwave to extinguish runaway oilfield fire. A Russian newspaper reported nuclear blasts first used in 1966 to put out a natural gas well fire in Uzbekistan.

In 1968, the Pamuk well explosion used a larger, 47-kiloton nuclear device that measured 9.5 inches by 10 feet. Two years of uncontrolled natural gas and saturated surrounding landscape yielded to the nuclear detonation at a depth of 8,000 feet. The runaway gas well died out seven days later.

Twice in 1972, USSR scientists used lower-yield detonations to extinguish massive fires. The smallest of the nuclear firefighting devices (3.8 kiloton) on July 7 squelched a runaway gas well fire in the Ukraine, about 12 miles north of Krasnograd.

The USSR program’s only recorded failure came in 1981 with the last Soviet use of firefighting nukes. On May 5, a nuclear device failed to shut down a 56 million cubic feet per day out of control natural gas well. The code-named Pyrite device had been positioned proximate to the well at a depth of 4,957 feet.

Petroleum history is important. Support link for AOGHS.

The 37.6-kiloton detonation in a sandstone-clay formation failed to seal the gas well, according to the USSR Ministry of Defense, which provided little more information.

By the 1950s, America was considering how to use nuclear weapons for constructive purposes — “Atoms for Peace.” In December 1961, Project Plowshare began examining the feasibility of various projects, including ways to improve natural gas production (see Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking”).

 Neither the Project Plowshare nor the Soviet Union’s Program No. 7 produced desirable results. With or without nukes, oilfield work then and now remains among the most dangerous jobs in the world. Fortunately, safety and prevention methods have improved along with the technologies for “making hole” and producing oil since the industry’s earliest wells in northwestern Pennsylvania.

_______________________

Recommended Reading: The Birth of the Oil Industry (1936); Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975); The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry (2009). 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 preserves U.S. petroleum history. Join AOGHS today as an annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2024 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Exploring Oilfield Firefighting Technologies.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/oilfield-firefighting-technologies. Last Updated: August 4, 2024. Original Published Date: January 31, 2022.

 

 

Inventing the Electric Submersible Pump

Armais Arutunoff designed a downhole centrifugal pump and founded an oilfield service company.

 

The modern petroleum industry owes a lot to the son of an Armenian soap maker. 

With the help of a prominent Oklahoma oil company president in the 1930s, Armais Sergeevich Arutunoff designed and built the earliest practical, downhole electric submersible pump. His invention would enhance oilfield production in wells worldwide.

Armais Arutunoff, inventor of the modern electric submersible pump.

Armais Arutunoff (1893-1978), inventor of the modern electric submersible pump.

A 1936 Tulsa World article described the Arutunoff electric submersible pump (ESP) as “an electric motor with the proportions of a slim fence post which stands on its head at the bottom of a well and kicks oil to the surface with its feet.”

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

By 1938, an estimated two percent of all oil produced in the United States with artificial lift was lifted by an Arutunoff pump (see All Pumped Up – Oilfield Technology).

Early Downhole Patents

The first patent for an oil-related electric pump was issued in the late 19th century during the growth of electrical power generation, according to a September 2014 article in the Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT).

In 1894, a design by Harry Pickett (patent no. 529,804) used a downhole rotary electric motor with “a Yankee screwdriver device to drive a plunger pump.”

Expanding Picket’s concept, Robert Newcomb in 1918 received a patent for his “electro-magnetic engine” driving a reciprocating plunger.

“Heretofore, in very deep wells the rod that is connected to the piston, and generally known as the ‘sucker’ rod, very often breaks on account of its great length and strains imposed thereon in operating the piston,” noted Newcomb in his patent application.

A 1951 "submergible" Reda Pump advertisement for well pump.

Armais Arutunoff obtained 90 patents, including one in 1934 for an improved well pump and electric cable. At right is a 1951 “submergible” Reda advertisement.

Although several patents followed those of Picket and Newcomb, the Journal reports, “It was not until 1926 that the first patent for a commercial, operatable ESP was issued — to ESP pioneer Armais Arutunoff. The cable used to supply power to the bottomhole unit was also invented by Arutunoff.”

Reda: Russian Electrical Dynamo of Arutunoff

Arutunoff built his first ESP in 1916 in Germany, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. “Suspended by steel cables, it was dropped down the well casing into oil or water and turned on, creating a suction that would lift the liquid to the surface formation through pipes,” reported OHS historian Dianna Everett.

After immigrating to the United States in 1923, in California Arutunoff could not find financial support for manufacturing his pump design. He moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1928 at the urging of a new friend — Frank Phillips, head of Phillips Petroleum Company.

“With Phillips’s backing, he refined his pump for use in oil wells and first successfully demonstrated it in a well in Kansas,” noted Everett. The device was manufactured by a small company that soon became Reda Pump.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

The name Reda – Russian Electrical Dynamo of Arutunoff – was the cable address of the company that Arutunoff originally started in Germany. The inventor would move his family into a Bartlesville home just across the street from Frank Phillips’ mansion.

REDA Pump founder Armais Arutunoff lived in this house in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

The founder of Reda Pump once lived in this Bartlesville, Oklahoma, home across from Frank Phillips, whose home today is a museum. Photo courtesy Kathryn Mann, Only in Bartlesville.

A holder of more than 90 patents in the United States, Arutunoff was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1974. “Try as I may, I cannot perform services of such value to repay this wonderful country for granting me sanctuary and the blessings of freedom and citizenship,” Arutunoff said at the time.

A modern ESP artificial lift diagram courtesy Schlumberger.

A modern ESP applies artificial lift by spinning the impellers on the pump shaft, putting pressure on the surrounding fluids and forcing them to the surface. It can lift more than 25,000 barrels of fluids per day. Courtesy Schlumberger.

Arutunoff died in February 1978 in Bartlesville. At the end of the twentieth century, Reda was the world’s largest manufacturer of ESP systems. It is now part of Schlumberger.

Armais Sergeevich Arutunoff was born to Armenian parents in Tiflis, part of the Russian Empire, on June 21, 1893. His hometown in the Caucasus Mountains dated back to the 5th Century. His father was a soap manufacturer and his grandfather a fur trader.

Centrifugal Pumps

As a young scientist, Arutunoff’s research convinced him that electrical transmission of power could be efficiently applied to oil drilling and improve the antiquated methods he saw in use in the early 1900s in Russia.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

A small, yet high-horsepower electric motor was needed, but limitations imposed by the available casing sizes required a relatively small motor.

A motor of small diameter was too low in horsepower for the job, Arutunoff discovered. He studied the fundamental laws of electricity seeking answers to how to build a higher horsepower motor exceedingly small in diameter.

By 1916, Arutunoff was designing a centrifugal pump to be coupled to the motor for de-watering mines and ships. To develop enough power, the motor needed to run at very high speeds. He successfully designed a centrifugal pump, small in diameter and with stages to achieve high discharge pressure.

Arutunoff designed a motor ingeniously installed below the pump to cool the motor with flow moving up the oil well casing, and the entire unit was suspended in the well on the discharge pipe. The motor, sealed from the well fluid, operated at high speed in oil.

Although Arutunoff built the first centrifugal pump while living in Germany, he built the first submersible pump and motor in the United States while living in southern California.

Friend of Frank

Arutunoff already had formed Reda to manufacture his idea for electric submersible motors, and after living in Germany, Arutunoff came to the United States with his wife and one-year-old daughter to settle in Michigan, and then Los Angeles.

However, after emigrating to America in 1923, Arutunoff could not find financial support for his downhole production technology. Everyone he approached turned him down, believing his downhole concept was impossible under the “laws of electronics.”

Petroleum history is important. Support link for AOGHS.

No one would consider his inventions until a friend at Phillips Petroleum Company — Frank Phillips — encouraged him to form his own company in Bartlesville. The Arutunoff family moved into a house on the same street as the Phillips home. 

The Reda Company manufacturing plant in Bartlesville , Okla.

Arutunoff’s manufacturing plant in Bartlesville spread over nine acres, employing hundreds during the Great Depression.

In 1928 Arutunoff moved to Bartlesville, where he formed Bart Manufacturing Company, which changed its name to Reda Pump Company in 1930. He soon demonstrated a working model of an oilfield electric submersible pump.

One of his pump-and-motor devices was installed in an oil well in the El Dorado field near Burns, Kansas — the first equipment of its kind to be used in a well. One reporter telegraphed his editor, “Please rush good pictures showing oil well motors that are upside down.”

By the end of the 1930s, Arutunoff’s company held dozens of patents for industrial equipment, leading to decades of success and even more patents. His “Electrodrill” aided scientists in penetrating the Antarctic ice cap for the first time in 1967.

Arutunoff oilfield technologies had a significant impact on the petroleum industry — quickly proving crucial to successful production for hundreds of thousands of U.S. oil wells.

Also see Conoco & Phillips Petroleum Museums.

_______________________

Recommended Reading: Artificial Lift-down Hole Pumping Systems (1984); Oil Man: The Story of Frank Phillips and the Birth of Phillips Petroleum (2016). 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. © 2024 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Inventing the Electric Submersible Pump.” Author: Aoghs.org Editors. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/electric-submersible-pump-inventor. Last Updated: June 13, 2024. Original Published Date: April 29, 2014.

Lane-Wells 100,000th Perforation

Founded in 1932, the oilfield service company Lane-Wells developed powerful perforating guns. 

 

Fifteen years after its first oil well perforation job, Lane-Wells Company returned to the same well near Montebello, California, to perform its 100,000th perforation. The publicity event of June 18, 1948, was a return to Union Oil Company’s La Merced No. 17 well.

 The gathering of executives at the historic well celebrated a significant leap in petroleum production technology. The combined inventiveness of the two oilfield service companies had accomplished much in a short time, “so it was a colorful ceremony,” reported a trade magazine.

A 1948 magazine article about historic Lane-Wells 100,000the oil well perforation.

As production technologies evolved after World War II, Lane-Wells developed a downhole gun with the explosive energy to cut through casing. Above, one of the articles preserved in a family scrapbook, courtesy Connie Jones Pillsbury, Atascadero, California.

Officials from both companies and invited guests gathered to witness the repeat performance of the company’s early perforating technology, noted Petroleum Engineer in its July 1948 issue. Among them were “several well-known oilmen who had also been present on the first occasion.”

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

Walter Wells, chairman of the board for Lane-Wells, was present for both events. The article reported he was more anxious at the first, which had been an experiment to test his company’s new perforating gun. In 1930, Wells and another enterprising oilfield tool salesman, Bill Lane, developed a practical way of using guns downhole. 

The two men envisioned a tool which would shoot steel bullets through casing and into the formation. They would create a multiple-shot perforator that fired bullets individually by electrical detonation. After many test firings, commercial success came at the Union Oil Company La Merced well.

Cover of a special publication featuring 75th anniversary of Baker Atlas oil well service company.

Cover of a special publication featuring 75th anniversary of Baker Atlas oil well service company. Lane-Wells became part of Baker Atlas, today a division of Baker-Hughes

Founded in Los Angeles in 1932, the oilfield service company Lane-Wells built a fleet of trucks as it became a specialized provider of well perforations — a key service for enhancing well production (see Downhole Bazooka).

The two men designed tools that would better help the oil industry during the Great Depression. “Bill Lane and Walt Wells worked long hours at a time, establishing their perforating gun business,” explained Susan Wells in a 2007 book celebrating the 75th anniversary of Baker-Atlas. 

“It was a period of high drilling costs, and the demand for oil was on the rise,” Wells added. “Making this scenario worse was the fact that the cost of oil was relatively low.”

Shotgun Perforator

By late 1935, Lane-Wells recognized high-powered guns were needed for breaking through casing, cement and into oil-bearing rock formations.

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

An experienced oilfield worker, Sidney Mims, had patented a similar technical tool for this, but he could not get it working as well as it should. Lane and Wells purchased the patent and refined the downhole gun design. Lane-Wells developed a remotely controlled 128-shot perforator — a downhole shotgun.

“Lane and Wells publicly used the reengineered shotgun perforator they bought from Mims on Union Oil’s oil well La Merced No. 17,” Wells noted. “There wasn’t any production from this oil well until the shotgun perforator was used, but when used, the well produced more oil than ever before.”

Lane-Wells woould become a major oilfield provider of perforating services using downhole “bullet guns,” seen here in 1940.

Lane-Wells provided perforating services using downhole “bullet guns,” seen here in 1940.

The successful application attracted many other oil companies to Lane-Wells as the company modified the original 128-shot perforator to use 6-shot and 10-shot cylinders. For a public relations event, executives decided to conduct the company’s 100,000th perforation almost 16 years after the first at the La Merced No. 17 well.

Continued success in Oklahoma and Texas oilfields led to new partnerships beginning in the 1950s. A Lane-Wells merger with Dresser Industries was finalized in March 1956, and another corporate merger arrived in 1968 with Pan Geo Atlas Corporation, forming the service industry giant Dresser Atlas.

A 1987 joint venture with Litton Industries led to Western Atlas International, which became an independent company before becoming a division of Baker-Hughes in 1998 (Baker Atlas) providing well logging and perforating services. Dresser merged with Halliburton the same year.

Preserving Oil History

Connie Jones Pillsbury of Atascadero, California, and the family of Walter T. Wells wanted to preserve rare Lane-Wells artifacts. She contacted the American Oil & Gas Historical Society for help finding a home for an original commemorative album, press-clippings and guest book from June 18, 1948. 

Support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society

Seeking to preserve the “Lane-Wells 100,000th Gun Perforating Job” event at Montebello, California — site of the Union Oil Company La Merced No. 17 well — Pillsbury and the children of Dale G. Jones, the grandson of Walter T. Wells, contacted petroleum museums, libraries, and archives (also see Oil & Gas Families). 

Pillsbury’s quest to preserve the Walter T. Wells album and records proved successful, and she emailed AOGHS to report the family’s album was “safely archived at the USC Libraries Special Collections. Sue Luftschein is the Librarian. It’s on Online Archive of California (OAC).”

 View showing the Lane-Wells Building located at 5610 S. Soto Street in Huntington Park.  The building still stands.

The Lane-Wells West Coast headquarters designed by architect William E. Mayer and completed in 1937 in what today is Huntington Park in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Water and Power Associates.

The Lane-Wells collection — Gift of Connie Pillsbury, October 27, 2017 — can be accessed via the OAC website. 

Title: Lane-Wells Company records
Creators: Wells, Walter T. and Lane-Wells Company
Identifier/Call Number: 7055
Physical Description: 1.5 Linear Feet 1 box
Date (inclusive): 1939-1954

The archive abstract also notes:

“This small collection consists of a commemorative album celebrating the 100,000th Gun Perforating Job by the Lane-Wells Company of Los Angeles on June 18, 1948 and additional printed ephemera, 1939-1954, created and collected by Walter T. Wells, co-founder and Chairman of the Board of the Lane-Wells Company.”

Pillsbury sought a museum or archive home for her rare oil patch artifact, which came from an event attended by many from the Los Angeles petroleum industry.

“The professionally-prepared book has all of the attendees signatures, photographs and articles on the event from TIME, The Oil and Gas Journal, Fortnight, Oil Reporter, Drilling, The Petroleum Engineer, Oil, Petroleum World, California Oil World, Lane-Wells Magazine, the L.A. Examiner, L.A. Daily News and L.A. Times, etc.,” Pillsbury noted in 2017.

Petroleum history is important. Support link for AOGHS.

The 1948 commemorative book, now preserved at USC, “was given to my first husband, Dale G. Jones, Ph.D., grandson of Walter T. Wells, one of the founders of Lane-Wells,” she added. “His children asked me to help find a suitable home for this book. I found you (the AOGHS website) through googling ‘History of Lane-Wells Company.’”

_______________________

Recommended Reading:  75 Years Young…BAKER-ATLAS The Future has Never Looked Brighter (2007); Wireline: A History of the Well Logging and Perforating Business in the Oil Fields (1990). 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. © 2024 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Lane-Wells 100,000th Perforation” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/oil-well-perforation-company. Last Updated: June 12, 2024. Original Published Date: June 30, 2017.

Shooters – A “Fracking” History

Evolution of technologies for fracturing geologic formations to increase oil and natural gas production.

 

Ever since the earliest U.S. oil discoveries, detonating dynamite or nitroglycerin downhole helped increase a well’s production. The geologic “fracking” technology commonly used in oilfields after the Civil War would be significantly enhanced when hydraulic fracturing arrived in 1949. 

Modern hydraulic fracturing — popularly known as petroleum well “fracking” — can trace its roots to April 1865, when Civil War Union veteran Lt. Col. Edward A. L. Roberts received the first of his many patents for an “exploding torpedo.” (more…)

Pin It on Pinterest