News Update

4/23/2009 10:52:02 AM

America's Oil & Gas Heritage

The historical society advocates education about petroleum history – promoting the industry’s significant social and scientific accomplishments. Energy educators increasingly recognize that 150 years of science and technological advances offer a context for teaching the modern industry.

Since 2004, AOGHS has published a 16-page quarterly newsletter, the Petroleum Age. Each issue features news about energy education programs and examples of the industry's too often neglected heritage.

Popular with museum directors and volunteers, workshop practitioners, high school teachers and students, Petroleum Age articles have been reprinted in many museum publications, state association newsletters, Hart’s E&P magazine, the American Gas Association’s American Gas magazine, the Association of Energy Service Contactor’s Well Servicing magazine, The American Oil & Gas Reporter, and local newspapers.

Below are Petroleum Age articles that have proven popular, especially for their original research and educational content.

Road Trip

From Vol. 6, No. 1, March 2009 Petroleum Age

“America on the Move” features the Smithsonian Institution’s extensive transportation collection using the latest multimedia technology. The new exhibition brings back to life the history of ships, trains, trucks, and automobiles. It also reveals America’s fascination with life on the road.

A red oilfield service truck from Shawnee, Okla., is among the notable petroleum-related exhibits at the National Museum of American History, which reopened Nov. 21, 2008, after an $85 million renovation.

The large exhibit area highlights the Smithsonian’s transportation collection, including displays showing the history of the interstate highway system and images and artifacts from Route 66.

ExxonMobile is among the sponsors of the Washington, D.C., special exhibits, which have a variety of themes aimed at educating young people about transportation in American history. Self-guided activity sheets are available for school groups.

A section about “life on the open road” notes how in the 1920s new highways began to affect people’s lives: “Some Americans used highways to migrate. Others earned a living on the road, or by its side, running businesses. Many Americans began to take to the highways for pleasure.”

Travelers often saw the highway as a symbol of independence and freedom – although they depended on government for the roads, and on businesses such as automobile and tire manufacturers, oil refiners, gas stations and roadside restaurants.

Route 66 & Interstates

Among the exhibits are images of Route 66, which was commissioned in 1926 and fully paved by the late 1930s. A prominent Tulsa, Okla., businessman (who also invested in the oil industry) is credited with creating the popular identity of Route 66.

Cyrus Avery, a Pennsylvania native, saw the need for better roads, the exhibit notes. As chairman of the Oklahoma Highway Commission, he helped plan the system for numbered highways. His proposal for a highway from Chicago to Los Angeles along a southwestern route was approved and designated U.S. 66 in 1926.

Avery founded the U.S. 66 Highway Association and coined the route’s nickname, “Main Street of America.”

Another exhibit notes that after decades of debate, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956 – and the interstate network was born. The 41,000-mile system was designed to reach every city with a population of more than 100,000.

An historical marker from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened in 1940, notes creation of one of the earliest service plazas, now commonplace on all interstate highways.

When the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940, it stretched 160 miles from Carlisle to Irwin. It would more than double in length by 1957. The “limited access” design of the turnpike became the model for future superhighways – the U.S. interstate system.

Almost completed by the 1990s, the total cost for the nation’s interstate system reached more than $100 billion.

The Route 66 exhibit includes the red Oklahoma “oil field service” truck owned by the Rufus Lillard Co. of Shawnee with this note:

The 20th century oil industry employed increasingly large numbers of men in the oilfields: their number rose from 22,230 workers in 1902 to 93,205 in 1919. Even more were employed building pipelines and working in refineries, corporate offices, and marketing. Despite the Depression, by the mid-1930s the oil industry employed some one million people.  -- Visit www.americanhistory.si.edu.

“The available supply of gasoline, as is well known, is quite limited, and it behooves the farseeing men of the motor car industry to look for likely substitutes.” – Horseless Age, 1905

As the American auto industry struggles, 21st century hybrids emulate their predecessors from more than 100 years ago. 

In the early days of the industry, electric, steam, and internal combustion automobiles vied for consumers’ attention. The petroleum industry’s rapid transition from kerosene to gasoline provided a powerful fuel, but internal combustion engines of the day were “noxious, noisy, and unreliable.” 

Electric cars were practical on level roads, even with their mammoth lead-acid batteries and limited range, but were largely confined to big cities where recharging infrastructure was available (see “Cantankerous Combustion” Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2008 Petroleum Age). 

Engineers of the day examined novel ways of combining electric motors and gasoline engines to exploit the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of each.

“In this system an electric generator or dynamo is coupled direct to the petrol motor, and the current furnished is employed to operate electric motors which drive the car,” notes the 1905 Automobile: A Practical Treatise on the Construction of Modern Motor Cars – Steam, Petrol, Electric, and Petro-Electric, by Paul Hasluck. 

Modern hybrids are much indebted to Ferdinand Porsche’s 1902 gasoline-electric Mixte. The Mixte used a small four-cylinder gasoline engine to generate electricity – but not to turn its wheels.

The engine powered two three-horsepower electric motors mounted in the Mixte’s front wheel hubs that could briefly surge to seven horsepower and carry it to a top speed of 50 mph.
 
While more than a century of technological evolution  separates Mixte from today’s hybrids, both rely upon gasoline to enhance and recall the virtues of “electrics” as automobiles with a future.

The Blue Flame

From Vol. 6, No. 1, March 2009 Petroleum Age

There are more than 120,000 vehicles on U.S. roads powered by natural gas, the cleanest-burning fossil fuel. Technological advances promise even greater natural gas use for transportation. Historic pursuit of the world land speed record is the heritage of this fuel of the future.

Throughout the 20th century, land speed records were set with vehicles powered by steam, electricity, and all manner of petroleum distillates. National pride was often at stake as British, American, French, Belgian, German, and Italian teams fielded competing machines.

By the 1960s, American innovation – at Utah’s famed Bonneville’s Salt Flats – took mankind’s need for speed to a new level. Jet engines began pushing the land record to previously unthinkable levels.

Jet Propellant 4 (JP-4), the U.S. Air Force’s primary jet fuel until the late 1990s, offered a powerful blend of kerosene and naptha. On the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1963, the fuel proved to be as good on the ground as it was in the air.
 
In August of 1963, the Spirit of America, a radical new design created by Craig Breedlove, used a $500 surplus jet engine that burned JP-4 to run 407.45 mph. His machine brought the land speed record back to the United States from England after an absence of more than 30 years.

However, just nine months later, Art Arfons, a drag racer from Ohio, took the land record after clocking 434 mph with his Green Monster using JP-4 in an afterburner equipped F-104 Starfighter jet engine.

Breedlove soon returned to Bonneville with his Spirit of America and pushed to a new record of 526 mph. Arfons responded with a run 10 mph faster. And so it went over three years of competition.

The Blue Flame Project

Breedlove’s Spirit of America Sonic 1 ultimately triumphed over Arfons’ Green Monsters and exceeded 600 mph to set a record that would not be bested until 1970 – when natural gas made its spectacular rocket fuel debut at Bonneville.

The natural gas-powered Blue Flame set a record that would not be broken for 13 years.

Sponsored by the American Gas Association (AGA), the Blue Flame sprang from the imaginations of three Milwaukee men with a passion for speed: Dick Keller, Ray Dausman, and Pete Farnsworth. After building a record-setting rocket dragster, the X-1 Rislone Rocket, they began the Blue Flame project in 1968.

Instead of a jet engine, the 38-foot, 6,500-pound Blue Flame was powered by a rocket motor that combined liquefied natural gas and highly purified hydrogen peroxide. The motor could produce 22,000 pounds of thrust – roughly 58,000 horsepower.

“The Institute of Gas Technology, which was the research and development arm of the American Gas Association at that time, was overseeing the project,” Farnsworth explained in a 2007 interview. “It was a promotion of the safety and usefulness of liquefied natural gas.”

Farnsworth noted support from the Illinois Institute of Technology as well. “There were nine graduate engineers working on masters degrees for theses on various aspects of the design of the Blue Flame: structures, dynamics, aerodynamics, wheel design, all sorts of things,” Farnsworth added.
 
AGA originally budgeted $165,000 for the project with 48 gas utilities and equipment manufacturers contributing. Ultimately more than $250,000 was spent. On Oct. 23, 1970, the Blue Flame rewarded its supporters with a new Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) official record of 622.407 mph. The record stood for 13 years.

Today, the land speed record is again held by the British. Their twin-engine, JP-4 burning Thrust SSC (Super Sonic Car) reached 763 mph on Oct. 15, 1997. It was the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier. 

Natural Gas Fuels

Natural gas supplies nearly one-fourth of U.S. energy, according to the American Gas Association website. The nation consumed 22.4 trillion cubic feet in 2004; experts say consumption will increase 20 percent by 2030. Most natural gas demand comes from electricity generators (natural gas because is considered the cleanest-burning fossil fuel).
 
According to the Natural Gas Vehicles for America, there are more than 120,000 natural gas vehicles on U.S. roads. Fifty different manufacturers produce 150 models of light, medium and heavy-duty vehicles and engines with about 22 percent of all new transit bus orders requesting natural gas. "Ninety-seven percent of the natural gas used in America is produced in North America" (85 percent from the United States and 12 percent from Canada).

Henry Ford's Record

The land speed record came to the United States in 1904 when Henry Ford wanted to prove to the world that his cars were built better than anyone else’s," notes a speed record website in Australia. "On Jan. 12 at Lake St. Clair, Mich., near Detroit, Ford bounced his Ford Arrow across the frozen lake to reach an average speed of 91.37 mph. He remarked of the run, after retirement, that it had scared him so bad that he never again wanted to climb into a racing car. With the news of his record spread around the country, his new car company got a much needed boost at becoming one of the most successful automobile manufacturers in history.”

Editor’s Note – The Blue Flame is on exhibit in Germany’s Sinsheim Auto & Technik Museum, near Heidelberg.

More than 4,500 offshore oil and natural gas platforms today supply 25 percent of the United States’ production of natural gas and 10 percent of its oil.

Thanks to a program begun two decades ago, today’s offshore production benefits both the economy and the environment.

Rigs to Reefs is a program in which offshore structures that are no longer producing remain in the marine environment. Today, they form the world’s largest artificial reef complex. This is a Gulf of Mexico success story, notes an article in Ocean Science, a Minerals Management Service quarterly magazine.

Although Rigs to Reefs developed as an official policy in the mid-1980s, the concept was first explored in 1979. The National Artificial Reef Plan paved the way for government-endorsed artificial reef projects.

The first planned conversion took place in 1979 with the re-location of an Exxon experimental subsea structure from offshore Louisiana to an artificial reef site off Apalachicola, Fla. In 1984, the National Fishing Enhancement Act established national artificial reef standards.

MMS then developed policies encouraging the reuse of obsolete offshore petroleum structures – requiring compliance with standards of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the criteria in the National Artificial Reef Plan of 1985, which allowed states to plan, construct, and manage artificial reefs.

Petroleum platforms are artificial habitats. Whether placed as an artificial reef or a working (producing petroleum) structure, they have been found to increase the algae and invertebrates that attract and significantly increase the numbers and species of fish.

However, when an offshore structure becomes obsolete, it typically is removed from the environment, taking away the habitat that it created and disrupting those organisms residing at the site. To prevent this disruption, Rig to Reefs allows oil and natural gas companies to choose to donate the reef to a coastal state – using one of three methods: tow-and-place, topple-in-place, or partial removal.

The program benefits petroleum platform owners by eliminating the high cost of transporting the structure for disposal. States benefit as the platform develops into an area that enhances commercial and recreational fishing, tourism, and the biological community.

According to MMS, the participating states benefit through cost sharing with industry. Typically, the petroleum company donates half of its savings to state coffers.

The populations that result from the recycled structures are called platform communities. Fish densities have been found to be an amazing 20 to 50 times higher than in open water. Each platform typically supports more than 10,000 fish.

In addition to fish, the platforms are home to many other forms of sea life; barnacles and mussels dwell on the hard surfaces, and sea turtles are often found close by. The result is a complex food chain formed in environments that did not previously have the characteristics to support a natural reef community.

The benefits to nearby coastal communities are substantial. Seventy-five percent of recreational fishing trips in Louisiana visit one or more rig sites for the excellent fishing.

These offshore platforms are an ideal choice for artificial reefs. Their size, density, and open design attract fish to the structures where they can swim easily through the circulating water. The structures are very stable during storms.

The platforms also provide the hard surface needed to create coral communities. As a result, MMS is working with the Coastal Marine Institute at Louisiana State University to study artificial reef corals. Another study is looking at the ecological effects of removing large numbers of petroleum structures.

In southern California, the populations of fish living in platform communities are the subject of several research projects. With many areas overfished, the increased population of fish at artificial reefs could be very valuable. The petroleum platforms in the Gulf of Mexico set the example.

“The fishing here is spectacular, whether it’s snapper, amberjack or grouper,” concludes charter boat Capt. Kerry Milano of Venice, La. “There’s really no limit to what you can catch at these offshore platforms. This is some of the best fishing anywhere in the world.”

Editor’s Note – Article adapted from Ocean Science, March/April/May 2008, an MMS magazine published quarterly that provides ocean science and technological information.

Whether it is an operating production platform or a retired rig intentionally placed, a typical four-pile, platform jacket provides almost three acres of living and feeding habitat for thousands of underwater species.

Marine biologists say that is important, because the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is a plain of mud, clay and sand...with little natural rock and reef habitat.

A June 2006 report by marine scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, demonstrates that California’s offshore oil and natural gas platforms are critical nursery habitat for a certain species of fish. According to the scientists, platforms play an important role in producing the young of a rockfish species on a scale that was previously unknown.

The findings have the potential to cause a significant shift in conventional thinking regarding artificial reefs. “This will have a huge impact on how we view these structures,” notes George Steinbach, executive director of the California Artificial Reef Enhancement Program.

“These platforms are better nursery habitat than the natural reefs in the area. They are contributing to the recovery of a severely depleted species in a significant way,” he adds.

Dr. Milton Love and his team of researchers found that the number of young Bocaccio rockfish around only eight platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel amounted to 20 percent of the average number found over the species’ entire range. The federal government has classified the Bocaccio as “overfished” by commercial fleets.

According to Don Kent, president of Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute, “When 20 percent of the next generation of Bocaccio for the entire West Coast is found in such a small area, you cannot ignore the importance of that area as habitat.”

Tom Raftican, president of United Anglers of Southern California, concluded, “With this data, it’s clear that these platforms should also be protected to help revitalize the rockfish population.”

From Vol. 4, No. 3, September 2007 Petroleum Age

as•tro•bleme (noun) – A depression, usually circular, on the surface of the Earth that is caused by the impact of a meteorite. From mid-20th century. astro- + Greek blçma “wound from a missile”

About 450 million years ago, a meteor struck north-central Oklahoma, creating an impact crater more than eight miles wide.

Today, the rural community of Ames proudly claims the crater as its own – and as an important contributor to the geological knowledge of the nation’s petroleum industry.

The Ames crater – an astrobleme – is buried by sediment about two miles deep, making it barely visible on the surface. On Aug. 18, 2007, Ames celebrated the opening of a new museum describing the meteor (estimated to have been the size of a football).

The museum is a small, open-ended A-frame structure that requires no staff. It features several image panels on the north and south walls of the structure. The panels describe the crater’s formation...and its geological significance.

A video includes the man who defied the experts and discovered oil in the crater – Enid independent producer Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources. 

Harold Hamm's Discovery 

Many geologists had believed impact craters to be unlikely locations for petroleum. Hamm, who had drilled wells in the Ames area since the early 1960s, thought otherwise. Although wells had been drilled nearby, no one had attempted to reach deep into the crater.

In 1991, Hamm’s geologist at Continental Resources found something unusual in the site, so they drilled deeper than the normal well for the area – about 10,000 feet – and struck oil. Initial production from this first well was 200 barrels a day. Cumulative production figures through 2006 show production in the Ames crater area approaching 11 million barrels.

According to the American Association of Professional Geologists (AAPG), the potential for petroleum production from impact craters “seized the attention of the Oklahoma oil industry in the early 1990s. Several new, deep wells in the Sooner Trend produced exceptional amounts of oil and gas.”

There have been many more wells completed in the Ames crater, some producing more than a million barrels. About 30 of the original wells are still producing. Production peaked in 1994, when the combined flow from three wells averaged more than 2,000 barrels of oil and 730,000 cubic feet of gas per day.

Since 1991, gross production has exceeded $120 million. The crater remains one of the few oil-producing craters in the world.

In Ames, Hamm was the primary developer of the Astrobleme museum. A flat-screen television provides visitors with detailed geological graphics. The video includes an introduction by Hamm, who spoke at the museum’s dedication during the annual Ames Day, a fundraising event for the volunteer fire department.

At the dedication, Bert Mackie, vice chairman of Security National Bank, who grew up in Ames and was the earliest advocate for promoting the crater’s historical significance, introduced Hamm and Charles Mankin, director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, who described the geology of the crater’s formation. Learn more at http://www.amescrater.com/about.htm

Editor’s Note – The museum idea originated when Bert Mackie suggested Harold Hamm put up educational signs in the area, denoting the crater’s significance. Hamm decided to build a museum. – Adapted from articles in the Enid News & Eagle, Aug. 19, 2007, and the AAPG Explorer, March 2002.  

Drilling or “making hole” began long before oil or natural gas were anything more than flammable curiosities found seeping from the ground. For centuries, digging by hand or shovel was the best technologies that existed to pry into the earth’s secrets.

Then the spring pole harnessed the resiliency of a bent tree to assist in pummeling a hole into the ground to find water. Ancient histories record the technique, which is still used in some corners of the world.

While repeatedly kicking down a stirrup was primitive and slow, the spring pole’s rope and chisel were practical drilling technologies.

Salt was an essential commodity for preserving food and extracting it from brine was a simple process. In 1802 in what is now West Virginia, salt brine drillers David and Joseph Ruffner took 18-months to drill through 40-feet of bedrock to a total depth of 58-feet using a spring pole.

The Ruffner brothers drilling ingenuity and innovation made the Kanawha River Valley a major salt manufacturing and distribution center in the early 1800s. Many early drilling technologies were developed there.

Although there was money to be made from salt brine wells, sometimes a good well would be fouled with the intrusion of unsought and unwanted oil. The rainbow sheen and pungent smell of oil was bad news to brine drillers.

Cable Tools 

The advent of cable tool drilling introduced the wooden derrick into the changing American landscape.

Using the same basic notion of chiseling a hole deeper and deeper into the earth, but adding the miracle of steam power and clever mechanical engineering, wells could be drilled far more efficiently.

Frequent stops were needed to remove the chipped-away rock and other material, bail out water – and sharpen the bit.

Bull wheels and hemp rope repeatedly hoisted and dropped heavy iron drill strings and a curious variety of bits deep into the borehole. Oil was still an adversary to those in search of either fresh water or brine.

However, savvy businessmen like the Ruffner brothers and Samuel Kier of Tarentum, Pa., learned to profit from this oil.

It had long been recognized that oil could be collected and used as a medicine, lubricant, and even a foul-smelling, smoky illuminant. American Indians gathered oil by using blankets to soak it up from natural seeps. The Ruffner brothers sold their oil to marketers of patent medicines and lubrication products.

A decade before the birth of the petroleum industry, Samuel Kier of Pittsburgh, Pa., sold 50-cent, half-pint bottles of Pennsylvania “Rock Oil” proclaiming its "Wonderful Medical Virtues." His advertisements featured cable tool derricks drilling brine wells.

When a Yale chemist, Benjamin Silliman, found that oil could be distilled into a kerosene illuminant, the world changed forever. Inspired entrepreneurs formed the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. with the idea of using cable tool drilling to extract oil they hoped to find near Pennsylvania’s known oil seeps at Oil Creek. It worked, and the petroleum age was born.

Kier soon abandoned his patent medicine and went into the kerosene refining business, buying all the oil he could get.

“Colonel” Edwin Drake’s 1859 discovery brought the drilling boom. Soon, cable tool rigs were everywhere, pounding into the earth, searching for oil. In June 1860, J.C. Rathbone, used a steam engine to power a rig and produced a 100-barrel-per-day gusher at only 140 feet.

In Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, the soft soil yielded to cable-tool drilling. But further west, oilmen found resistant rock strata that made drilling far more difficult.

Rotary Rigs 

A new technology answered the call of necessity and the lure of opportunity. Rotary drilling is most often associated with the spectacular Spindletop Hill discovery near Beaumont, Texas, in 1901.

Instead of the repetitive lift and drop of heavy cable-tool bits, rotary drilling introduced the hollow drill stem which enabled broken rock debris to be washed out of the borehole with re-circulated mud while the rotating drill bit cut deeper.

Rotary drilling uses fluids (drilling mud) to circulate out the rock as it is chipped away. The fluid washes out the drill hole as it goes, making the process more efficient. Drilling mud also stops an oil well from bursting forth unexpectedly – gushers.

Meanwhile, grinding their way through layers of rock rather than pounding, the heavy fishtail bits made history.

Rotary rigs soon became the preferred means of drilling for oil, although to this day they still share the oil patch with a few cable tool rigs. The record depth recorded for a cable tool rig is 11,145 feet.

On Russia’s Kola Peninsula, a rotary rig reached than 40,000 feet after ten years of drilling.

Hughes' Drill Bit

Fishtail bits became obsolete in 1909 when Howard Hughes Sr. introduced the twin-cone roller bit. History remembers several men who were trying to develop better drill bit technologies, but it was Hughes who made it happen.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) notes that about the same time Hughes developed his bit, Granville A. Humason of Shreveport, La., patented the first cross-roller rock bit, the forerunner of the Reed cross-roller bit.

By 1934, Hughes had patented a three-cone bit, an enduring design that remains much the same today. Rotary drilling revolutionized the search for oil by allowing deeper wells through harder rock formations.

More innovations followed. Frank Christensen and George Christensen developed the earliest diamond bit in the 1941. The tungsten carbide tooth came into use in the early 1950s.

The company Hughes founded would merge in 1987 with one founded in 1927 by Carl Baker (Baker Oil Tool).

In 1990, Baker Hughes purchased the Christensen company, which in 1992 resulted in the first rolling cone bit company and first diamond bit company becoming today’s Hughes Christensen, a Baker Hughes company.

Editor’s Note – Biographers note that Howard Hughes Sr. met Granville Humason in a Shreveport bar, where Humason sold his roller bit rights to Hughes for $150. The University of Texas’ Center for American History has a 1951 recording of Humason’s recollections of that chance meeting. He recalls he spent $50 of his sale proceeds at the bar during the balance of the evening.

In 1922, it took a Texas wildcatter’s experience and ingenuity to bring an end to the days of oil gushers. Like wooden derricks and steam boilers, gushers have long since receded into the pages of oilfield lore.

The image of James Dean celebrating in a rain of gusher oil is a compelling icon, but those days are long gone. By 1956, when the Academy Award winning movie “Giant” was made, the technology of well control and blowout prevention was already more than 30 years old.

Early gushers were dramatic, but good for no one. They were spectacular, deadly, and wasteful.

Probably the best-known blowout gusher occurred at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas. On Jan. 10, 1901, a three-man crew was drilling a well for Captain A. F. Lucas when a six-inch stream of oil and gas erupted 100 feet into the air.

The Beaumont newspaper described it as, “An Oil Geyser – Remarkable Phenomenon South of Beaumont - Gas Blows Pipe from Well and a Flow of Oil Equaled Nowhere Else on Earth.”

It took nine days and 500,000 barrels of oil before a shut off valve could be affixed to the casing to stop the flow. Several days later, all was lost in a huge fire.

Patent records abound with inventors’ efforts to find a solution to controlling the underground pressure encountered when drilling. It took a successful wildcatter’s ingenuity to finally devise a workable “blowout preventor” and bring an end to the days of gushers.

James Abercrombie of Huntsville, Texas, had personal experience with the dangers of uncontrollable blowouts, having narrowly escaped one himself. The event was reported:

“With a roar like a hundred express trains racing across the countryside, the well blew out, spewing oil in all directions. The derrick simply evaporated. Casings wilted like lettuce out of water, as heavy machinery writhed and twisted into grotesque shapes in the blazing inferno.”

Abercrombie started in the oilfields as a roustabout in 1908 working for the Goose Creek Production Co. and by 1920 owned several rigs in south Texas. He met Harry Cameron in the machine shops of the Cameron-Devant Co., where Abercrombie was a frequent customer.

The two soon became friends and business partners.

In 1920, Abercrombie and Cameron formed Cameron Iron Works to repair drilling rigs and sell supplies and parts to oilmen. They employed five men with two lathes, a drill press, and hand tools. They named the company Cameron because Abercrombie already had two companies with his name.

Abercrombie said of his friend, “Harry Cameron was a great machine-tool man. You could give him a piece of iron and he could make just about anything you wanted.”

Abercrombie came up with the idea for a “ram-type” blowout preventor – using rams (hydrostatic pistons) to close on the drill stem and form a seal against the well pressure. He sketched out an idea on the sawdust floor of the Cameron Iron Works machine shop in Humble, Texas.

Abercrombie and Cameron worked out the details, using simple, rugged parts. When installed on a wellhead, the rams could be closed off, allowing full control of pressure during drilling and production.

In 1922, their patented Type MO blowout preventor (BOP) could withstand pressures of up to 3,000 psi. Subsequent improvements continued to increase the device’s capability.

The blowout preventor saved lives and quickly became an industry standard. An original Abercrombie and Cameron blowout preventer was displayed in the Smithsonian Institution for many years before returning to Cooper Cameron headquarters in Houston, where it is now on display in the lobby.

Modern drilling technology continues to evolve in its quest to find and recover petroleum. Today’s blowout preventors can withstand 15,000 psi. The early contributions of pioneers like James Abercrombie, Harry Cameron, and others made the search safer, more productive, and more sensitive to the environment.

In 2003, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) recognized the Cameron Ram-Type Blowout Preventor as an “Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.” The patent, above right, was originally filed on April 14, 1922. Subsequent patents improved performance and capability.

James Abercrombie died Jan. 7, 1975. His success in the oilfields and philanthropy made him one of Houston’s leading citizens. – Adapted from the July 2003 ASME designation ceremony.

Mabel's Eyelashes

From Vol. 2, No. 1, March 2005 Petroleum Age

Few associate 1860s oil wells with women’s smiling faces, but they are fashionably related. This is the story of how the goop that accumulates around an oil well's sucker-rod first made its way to the eyelashes of American women.
 
In 1865, a 22-year-old chemist left the prolific oilfields of Titusville, Pa., to return to his Brooklyn laboratory and experiment with a waxy substance that clogged well-heads.

Within a few years Robert Augustus Chesebrough would patent a method that turned the paraffin-like goop into a balm he called “petroleum jelly.” In 1872, he patented a new product, “Vaseline.” 

Even before America’s first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, Chesebrough was in the “coal oil” business in Brooklyn. His expertise was in the reduction of cannel coal into kerosene -- a much in demand illuminant.

Chesebrough knew of the process for refining oil into kerosene, so when Col. Edwin Drake’s Aug, 27, 1859, discovery launched the petroleum industry, he was one of many who rushed to the Titusville oilfields to make his fortune. 

Scientific American reported, “Now commenced a scene of excitement beyond description. The Drake Well was immediately thronged with visitors arriving from the surrounding country, and within two or three weeks thousands began to pour in from the neighboring States.”

Robert Chesebrough’s fortune was out there somewhere; he just had to find it.

Purifying Petroleum

In the midst of the Venango County oilfield chaos, Chesebrough noted that drilling was often confounded by a waxy paraffin-like substance that clogged the wellhead and drew the curses of riggers who had to stop drilling to scrape away the stuff.

The only virtue of this goopy “rod wax” was as an immediately available “first aid” for the abrasions, burns, and other wounds routinely afflicting the crews. 

Chesebrough eventually abandoned his notion of drilling a gusher and returned to New York, where he began working in his laboratory to purify the troublesome sucker-rod wax, which he dubbed “petroleum jelly.” 

By August of 1865, he had filed the first of several patents, “…for purifying petroleum or coal oils by filtration.”

He experimented with the purported analgesic effect of his extract by inflicting minor cuts and burns on himself, then applying his purified petroleum jelly. He gave it to Brooklyn construction workers to treat their minor scratches and abrasions.

On June 4, 1872, Chesebrough patented a new product that would endure to this day -- “Vaseline.” His patent extolled Vaseline’s virtues as a leather treatment, lubricator, pomade, and balm for chapped hands. He soon had a dozen wagons distributing the product around New York.

Customers used his product creatively: treating cuts and bruises, removing stains from furniture, polishing wood surfaces, restoring leather, and preventing rust.  Within 10 years, Americans were buying it at the rate of a jar a minute. 

An 1886 issue of Manufacture and Builder even reported, “French bakers are making large use of vaseline in cake and other pastry.  Its advantage over lard or butter lies in the fact that, however stale the pastry may be, it will not become rancid.” 

Flavor notwithstanding, Chesebrough himself consumed a spoonful of Vaseline each day and lived to be 96 years old. 

Lash-Brow-Ine

It wasn’t long before thrifty young ladies found another use for Vaseline. As early as 1834, the popular book Toilette of Health, Beauty, and Fashion had suggested alternatives to the practice of darkening eyelashes with elderberry juice or a mixture of frankincense, resin, and mastic.

“By holding a saucer over the flame of a lamp or candle, enough ‘lamp black’ can be collected for applying to the lashes with a camel-hair brush,” the book advised. Chesebrough’s female customers found that mixing lamp black with Vaseline made impromptu mascara.

The story goes that in 1913, Miss Mabel Williams, in pursuit of her boyfriend “Chet,” employed just such a concoction. Perhaps she used coal dust or some other readily available darkening agent, but in any case, her brother, Thomas L. Williams, was intrigued. 

Inspired by his sister’s example, Williams began selling the mixture by mail-order catalog, calling it “Lash-Brow-Ine” (an apparent concession to the mascara’s Vaseline content). Women loved it.

By 1915, it was clear that his “Lash-Brow-Ine” had potential, despite the product’s less than memorable name. In honor of his newly married sister Mabel (she had married Chet in 1914), he renamed the mascara “Maybelline” and launched a cosmetics empire. Hollywood helped. 

The 1920s silent screen brought new definitions to glamour. Theda Bara (an anagram for “Arab Death”) and Pola Negri, each with daring eye makeup, smoldered in packed theaters across the country.

Maybelline trumpeted its mail-order mascara in movie and confession magazines as well as Sunday newspaper supplements. Sales continued to climb. By the 1930s, Maybelline mascara was available at the local five-and-dime store for ten cents a cake.

Today, both Vaseline (now part of Unilever) and Maybelline (now a subsidiary of L’Oréal), continue with highly successful products, distantly removed from Titusville’s antique derricks and oil wells.

Unilever’s Park Avenue public relations agency, M Booth & Associates of New York, proclaims: “From Vaseline Petroleum Jelly – the “Wonder Jelly” introduced in 1870, to Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion…Vaseline products have helped deliver healthy, moisturized skin for 135 years.”

All Pumped Up

From Vol. 3, No. 3, September 2006 Petroleum Age

When an oilman’s hard work pays off with a producing well, much remains to be done before the oil can make it to market.

In 1859, “Colonel” Edwin Drake used a common water well hand pump to retrieve oil from 69.5 feet. It wasn’t long before necessity and ingenuity combined to find something more efficient.

Oil wells will run dry, but advances in technologies can put off the inevitable. Even with the best technologies, more than half of the oil can remain trapped.

The evolution of oil production is reflected in thousands of marginally producing oil and natural gas wells quietly reaching for often stubborn reserves. Low-volume “stripper” wells produce no more than 15 barrels a day.

The average stripper well produces only about 2.2 barrels per day. However, these wells comprise 84 percent of domestic oil wells and produce over 20 percent of all domestic oil – an amount roughly equal to imports from Saudi Arabia.

Marginal oil and natural gas wells number about 650,000 of the nation’s 876,000 wells. Once shutdown, they are lost forever. Keeping them in production has long been a challenge for a special breed of oilman.

“This is an occupation where most of your work is done in all types of weather while working alone, with few thanks, and possibly only a small herd of cattle as company,” noted the Oklahoma Commission on Marginally Producing Oil and Gas Wells in 2003. It was the same in the industry’s earliest days.

Jerk Lines

Marginal quantities of oil always need help leaving the well. In the early days of the industry, oilmen adapted water-well technology to the problem and used steam-driven walking beam pump systems. At each well, a steam engine rhythmically raised and lowered one end of a sturdy wooden beam, which pivoted on a Samson post.

The walking beam’s other end cranked a long string of sucker rods up and down to pump oil to the surface. The beam walked and the oil surfaced, but a more efficient system was needed.

One of the early oil pumping innovations came from an 1875 patent:

“Heretofore it has been necessary to have a separate engine for each well, although often several such engines are supplied with steam from the same boiler. The object of our invention is to enable the pumping of two or more wells with one engine. By it the walking-beams of the different wells are made to move in different directions at the same time, thereby counterbalancing each other, and equalizing the strain upon the engine.”

However, it was not long before a more compact and efficient mechanism replaced the multiple wooden Samson post and walking beam arrangement.

The 1913 Simplex Pumping Jack was a widely popular offering from Oil Well Supply Co. of Oil City, Pa. A central power source could connect and operate several of these dispersed Simplex units by way of steel rod lines (also called jerk lines.)

Roger Riddle, a local resident and field guide for the Oil & Gas Museum in Parkersburg, W. Va., was raised around central power units and the rhythmic clanking of rod lines. Today, he guides visitors through the nearby woods where remnants of these elaborate systems quietly rust.

“They pumped with just these steel rods, just dangling through the woods,” says Riddle. “You could hear them banging along – it was really something to see those work. The cost of pumping wells was pretty cheap.”

Steam power initially drove many of these eccentric power units, but some engines were converted to burn the natural gas or other inflammables often found with oil.

Steam engines converted to gasoline power were called “half-breeds” and remained beloved among collectors of oilfield antiques. The conversions usually replaced the steam cylinder with a jacketed cylinder and piston assembly, keeping the original frame and flywheel. The new engine was half steam and half internal combustion, hence the name.

Early internal combustion engines produced only a few horsepower and could not replace steam engines in most applications, but by 1890 they were powerful enough for most portable or remote operations. Electrification arrived and the heyday of central power units passed, but not entirely.

Today, a few miles from Flat Rock, two of Illinois’ once abundant central power units still operate in Crawford County. Ninety-five-year-old Herman Tohill still remembers when Ohio Oil Co. installed the units and rod lines on his grandfather’s land. Two sturdy 35 horsepower Superior gasoline engines provide the power.

As tenacious and efficient as central these power units were, time and technology changed the oilfield again.

Trout's Prototype

A new icon of oilfield success appeared and was soon known by many names: Donkey, Grasshopper, Horse-head, Thirsty Bird, and Pump-jack, among others.

As East Texas timber supplies dwindled and the sawmill business declined, the long-established Lufkin Foundry & Machine Co. discovered new opportunities in the oilfield and not only survived, but prospered.

Walter C. Trout was working in Texas for Lufkin Foundry & Machine Company in 1925 when he sketched out his idea for the now familiar counterbalanced oilfield pump jack. Before the end of the year, the prototype was installed and working near Hull, Texas, in a Humble Oil Co. field.

“The well was perfectly balanced, but even with this result, it was such a funny looking, odd thing that it was subject to ridicule and criticism, and it took a long time, nearly a year, before we could convince many the idea was a good one,” Trout explained.

Modern stripper wells still look much like Walter Trout’s original, but they enjoy the reliability and efficiency that 80 more years of evolving technology have produced.

Today, Lufkin Industries produces a variety of oilfield pumping units designed to meet worldwide needs. More than 200,000 units have been sold.

Editor’s Note – In 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled an oilfield on the California coast, resulting in mass panic but little damage. The only casualty was a Lufkin Co. pumping unit (see “Aliens Attack,” Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2005 Petroleum Age).

In January 1864, John Wilkes Booth made his first of several trips to Franklin, Pa., where purchased a lease on the Fuller farm. Maps of the day show the three-acre strip of land on the farm, about one mile south of Franklin and on the east side of the Allegheny River.

The 1863 theater season had brought the 24-year-old aspiring actor the fame he had long pursued. For years, he had struggled in the shadows of his renowned thespian father, Junius, and brothers, Edwin and Junius, Jr.

Booth had opened his stage career in 1855 at the Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore and became a member of the Richmond Theatre in 1858. Unlike the rest of his family, he would become a Confederate sympathizer as audiences in Richmond adopted him as one of their own. They loved the energy he brought to his Shakespearean performances – his sword fights and dangerous leaps from balconies.

Popular success followed on stages in Baltimore, New York, and Boston. “Star of the first magnitude,” “the youngest star in the world,” and “the most handsome man on the American stage” became commonplace praise in theatre columns. Booth’s meager fortunes changed and after years of just getting by, he suddenly found himself earning $20,000 in the theater season – the equivalent of over $300,000 today. 

Booth began spending his newfound wealth. Acquaintance John Simonds, a teller at Boston’s Mechanics Bank, assisted Booth in the purchase of a choice $8,000 lot in Boston’s exclusive Back Bay area.

A devoted son, Booth had the property titled in his mother’s name, Mary Ann Booth. He also bought $1,500 worth of Boston Water Co. shares, as well as $3,000 in U.S. bonds and $1,000 in Philadelphia bonds.

Riding the crest of his financial success, he wrote to friend Edwin Keach, “My goose does indeed hang high.” 

Pennsylvania Oilman

In late 1863, Booth performed at the Cleveland Academy of Music, managed by his friend John Ellsler. With local news-papers full of tantalizing stories of the oil boom in Venango County, Pa., Booth convinced Ellsler and associate Thomas Mears to join him in a new investment.

Together, they formed the “Dramatic Oil Company.” 

In January 1864, Booth made his first trip to Franklin, Pa., where much of the oil excitement was centered. There he purchased a 3.5-acre lease on the Fuller farm. The Venango County Recorder’s Office, Deed Book Z, page 309, subsequently detailed their agreement:

"between Thomas G. Mears of the city of Cleveland, State of Ohio, and Teresa Wilhelmina, his wife, parties of the first part, and Joseph H. Simonds of the Borough of Franklin, County of Venango and State of Pennsylvania, in trust for himself and John A. Ellsler of the city of Cleveland, State of Ohio and John Wilkes Booth of the city of New York, to be held as part for the sum of $4000 lawful money of the USA all that certain piece or parcel of land situate in the township of Cranberry, County of Venango, and the State of Pennsylvania...”     
                                                                  
The Dramatic Oil Company hired an experienced driller, Henry Sires.

When first introduced to John Wilkes Booth at a typically grimy field location, Sires apologized for his oily handshake, to which the gentlemanly Booth replied, “Never mind, that’s what we are after.”

They named their first well Wilhelmina in honor of partner Thomas Mears’ wife and drilling began in the summer of 1864.  

The well proved costly and difficult, but a depth of 1,900 feet, to the partners’ delight, it came in as a producer. Although the price of crude oil often fluctuated greatly, that summer is was selling for about $16 to $20 a barrel.

Believing his fortune would be made in the Pennsylvania oilfield,  Booth drew his last paycheck as an actor and left the Boston stage on May 28, 1864, to focus exclusively on the oil business. 

Shooting the Well

By June of 1864, Booth had invested another $1,000 of his now substantially diminished cash for a 1/30 share in a Boston Oil Well Company lease (later Botolph Oil & Mining Company) on Hyner farm of Pithole Creek.

Two months after Booth's death, the famous “Homestead Well” would come in on this property, yielding 500 barrels a day and making many fortunes. 

Meanwhile, the Dramatic Oil Company’s Wilhelmina well was producing about 25 barrels of oil daily -- but was beset with problems and mounting costs.
Booth and his partners finally determined that “shooting” their well could increase its production. At the time, this technique required that a large quantity of black powder be detonated deep in the well. 

Successful shooting would fragment an oil-bearing formation and enable far more oil to be extracted from the well. Booth and his partners gambled. They lost.

Thomas Mears’ son Frank later recorded, “…the well was ‘shot’ with explosives to increase production.  Instead of accomplishing that, the blast utterly ruined the hole and the well never yielded another drop.” 

John Wilkes Booth’s dreams of oil wealth abruptly and permanently collapsed. He had lost over $6,000 in the Wilhelmina well.

Booth left the oil region in July 1864 -- no longer the wealthy entrepreneur he had been just 18-months earlier. A few weeks later, Booth checked into Baltimore’s Barnum Hotel.

In this hotel, the Lincoln conspiracy first began to take shape with Booth’s boyhood friends and former Confederate soldiers, Michael O'Laughlen and Samuel B. Arnold.

Over the next eight months, the plan would evolve from kidnapping to assassination, culminating in Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, when Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. His own life ended with a bullet when the Union cavalry caught up with him 12-days later, about 60 miles south of Washington, DC. 

History is left to wonder what path John Wilkes Booth and the nation might have taken, had only his venture into Pennsylvania’s booming oilfields succeeded. 

Florida's First Discovery

From Vol. 1, No. 1, June 2004 Petroleum Age

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.

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.

Barron Collier

Around this time, one of Florida's most revered visionaries and entrepreneurs, Barron G. Collier, was busily purchasing land in the sparsely populated southwest part of the state. Between 1921 and 1923, he acquired about 1.3 million acres that would eventually become Collier and Hendry counties, including what is now the “Big Cypress Preserve.”

Collier had made his fortune in streetcar advertising sales, beginning in his native Memphis and spreading from New York to San Francisco as Consolidated Street Railway Advertising Company. With his capital and a vision of Florida alien to most, one of his first challenges was construction of the Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41).

This road, extending for 368 miles from Tampa southward along the Gulf coast to Naples, then eastward to Miami, was built through some of the most difficult terrain in the United States – mostly dense swamps and wilderness infested with snakes and alligators.

Barron Collier's advocacy and personal financial backing was key to successful completion of the Tamiami Trail in April 1928. Ever the savvy businessman, Collier negotiated his first oil lease in the county with Gulf Oil Company in the mid 1930s, despite Florida's still unbroken string of dry holes.

Gulf Oil brought in 50 men to conduct seismic testing, using the first big-wheeled “swamp buggy” vehicles of their type in the county. Gulf established headquarters in Everglades City, then the county seat, and began the search.

For 10 years, Gulf searched. The company drilled a number of wells, some to a depth of about 6,000 feet, but ultimately, seismic tests convinced them that full scale drilling was not warranted and in 1938, Gulf Oil pulled out.

$50,000 Bounty

By 1939, almost 80 dry holes had been drilled, the deepest to a depth of 6,180 feet. About this time, Florida legislators, desperate for their state to become an oil producer, offered a $50,000 bounty for the first discovery.

Hoping to find success at greater depth, Peninsular Oil and Refining Company drilled in Southwest Florida's Monroe County to 10,006 feet, but still found no oil.

Collier's confidence nevertheless remained unshakeable. His son relates of the time, “I said to dad, ‘You know, perhaps we have to face the fact that maybe there is no oil in Collier County.’ Well, he was just absolutely furious. He shook his finger under my nose and said, ‘Just don't let anybody tell you that there isn't any oil in Collier County.’ And when I looked at him, he smiled and said, ‘I can smell it.’”

Following their Monroe county disappointment, Peninsular executed a lease assignment to Humble Oil and Refining Co. and Humble began searching near the Sunniland watering stop on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.

Barron Collier remained confident that oil would be found in southwest Florida, but when he died in 1939, oil in Florida remained an unrealized dream.

At Sunniland, the search continued, with the drilling done by the Hoffland Brothers of Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the foremost drilling companies in the country.

Then, on the 26th of September 1943, after expending about $1 million and reaching a depth of 11,626, Humble Oil Co. brought in Sunniland No. 1, Florida's first producing oil well.

The well's site is about 12-miles south of Immokalee, by present day Big Cypress Preserve and a 30-minute drive from the resort city of Naples.

Initial daily production was 140 barrels of oil and 425 gallons of salt water, which eventually settled down to 20 barrels per day. This was no gusher, but it proved the tenacious Barron Collier's wildcatter intuition to have been right on target.

Predictably, the Humble Oil Co. find sparked a flurry of lease purchases and wildcat wells. By 1954, the Sunniland field was producing 500,000 barrels per year from eleven wells at average depths of 11,575 feet. Sunniland remained Florida's top producer until 1964, when Sun Oil Co., after spending $10 million on 34 dry holes, discovered the Felda field in nearby Hendry County.

Pleased with its discovery of the Sunniland oilfield, Humble Oil accepted the $50,000 prize offered by the state, added $10,000 – and donated the $60,000 equally between the University of Florida and the Florida State College for women.

Humble would later become the Exxon Corp., now ExxonMobil. 

Million Barrel Museum

From Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2006 Petroleum Age

In the heart of the Permian Basin, eight miles southeast of Odessa in Ector County, Texas, tourists can view the second largest meteor crater in the United States. But in neighboring Ward County, the community of Monahans boasts its own attraction that can also be seen from space -- an oil museum like no other.

Families traveling west from Odessa on I-20 are invited to visit the Million Barrel Museum, home of an engineering marvel -- a giant elliptical cement oil tank built by Shell Oil Company in 1928. According to Elizabeth Heath of the Ward County Historical Commission, it is the size of three football fields.

“There were great oil discoveries around 1926 and few places to put the oil, no pipelines or tanks,” Heath explains. “Shell had a lot of production coming from Wink, Texas, and came up with the idea of digging a big hole in the ground. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

A local high school math teacher measured the dimensions of the tank at 522 feet by 425 feet. In theory, she noted at the time, its capacity was more than 5 million barrels, but only one million barrels were ever stored before being shipped by rail to refineries in Oklahoma.

The concrete-covered earthen walls slope at a 45-degree angle. The tank once had a domed roof made of California redwood, supported by massive and heavily oil-proofed posts spaced 14 feet apart. A network of tall lightning rods rose above. Heath says the concrete-covered dirt- and wire-mesh walls took three months to build with teams of mules hauling the wood and cement.

“But Shell found it didn’t work. It leaked from too many places and the company couldn’t seal it properly,” she comments. “When Shell workers poured the cement, they did it in sections, so it made seams all around. You didn’t have caulking like we have today, so oil seeped into the sand. Between the seepage and the evaporation, they lost a lot.”

Visitors from all over the world have come to see the structure, which shows its age in several places and sports some graffiti from various Monahans high school classes, Heath observes. Shell pumped out the oil and dismantled the tank soon after the start of the Great Depression in the early 1930s.

Water Park

The oil tank-crater, empty and abandoned, gaped on Monahans’ East Side of for decades. Then in 1954, a local couple, Wayne and Amalie Long, purchased it from Shell and turned it into a water park.

The Longs constructed a boat ramp from the opening Shell had made to remove equipment, the interior 14-foot pillars, and the roof.

Although the water park did, indeed, attract many boaters, swimmers and fishermen, a series of leaks soon forced its closing. The website Roadtripamerica.com includes a January 2006 letter from Wallace Dickey Jr., the nephew of the entrepreneurial Manahans couple, which offers this first-hand account of the Million Barrel Museum’s history:

“My uncle and aunt Wayne and Amalie Long were the entrepreneurs who bought the million-barrel oil tank and tried to turn it into a swimming and fishing hole in the 1950s. I was there in the summer of 1958, when I was in high school, when they tried to turn it into a stock car racetrack after it would not hold water long enough for fishing and swimming. It was my aunt, after my uncle’s passing in 1980, who turned it into a museum and donated it to the state for a state park that makes it what it is today.”

Preserving History

In 1986, Amalie Long donated the tank and the more than 14 acres surrounding it to the Ward County Historical Commission “because her husband wanted it to be a community project, something we could work on for local history.”

With the help of a local teacher and local historians, the Million Barrel Museum was born in 1988.

A 1999 Odessa American newspaper interview with curator Carolyn Cook noted the international appeal of the tank. She described a group Japanese tourists who “spoke very little English, and they kept asking, ‘Where are the barrels?’ It took quite a while to explain why there weren’t any barrels here, especially since I speak pure Texan.”

The Million Barrel Museum today includes Monahans’ first jail, railroad memorabilia and a restored turn-of-the-century boarding house.

The concrete walls now make an amphitheater for community events held several times a year, the most popular being a Fajita cook-off held in May that attracts more than 5,000 people.

The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is free.

Illustrating Petroleum

From Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2008 Petroleum Age

Discovering the story of petroleum – and the many ways it shapes the world – is the theme of a new illustrated guide to the industry’s past, present and future.

“Our world is ruled by oil. People have used oil for thousands of years, but in the last century we have begun to consume it in vast quantities,” begins the first chapter, designed to explain the world’s largest and most complex industry – to students.

Oil and Natural Gas is an educational book specifically targeted for students. It is part of a new initiative from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE).

The book, adapted for SPE from a 2007 edition by DK Publishing, London, features such topics as ancient oil, oil for light, natural gas, deepwater technology, piped oil, refineries, global oil, electricity, oil substitutes, and job opportunities.

At only 72 pages, the hardbound edition offers young people a surprisingly comprehensive introduction to the history and many uses of oil. Many highly detailed illustrations tell much of the story.

SPE has established a website for students, teachers and the public designed to help them become more educated energy consumers. The book is part of the SPE “essential energy education” website, www.energy4me.org.

The new website includes many links for students and teachers. SPE members are available to speak to classrooms (primary, middle and secondary students) about energy in everyday lives and about career opportunities. Teachers can request a presentation at the energy4me website. The nonprofit organization also sponsors teacher workshops and addresses teachers at their events.

SPE members who make an energy-related presentation at a school or another student organization can provide complimentary copies of the Oil and Natural Gas book for the library or classroom.

The SPE energy education website offers comprehensive information about careers, including resources at SPE’s local sections, which offer scholarships for students interested in pursuing careers in petroleum engineering and related fields.

Editor’s Note – Based in Richardson, Texas, SPE provides energy education through publications, conferences, workshops, forums, and websites. Bulk orders of Oil and Natural Gas are available from SPE for $10 per book. To request information, email energyed@energy4me.org or call (972) 952- 9393.

Geology Merit Badge

From Vol. 5, No. 2, June 2008 Petroleum Age

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. There are more than 120 merit badges today.

The story behind the geology merit badge is told at the Houston Geological Society website, www.hgs.org, which offers potential badge earners many resources.

Geologist Jeff Spencer, himself an Eagle Scout, contributed the article several years ago. Today, he is a vice president and founder of Black Pool Energy, Houston, and a frequent contributor to Oil-Industry History, the annual journal of the Petroleum History Institute, Oil City, Pa.

According to Spencer, the original mining merit badge had four requirements: know and name 50 minerals; name and describe the 14 great divisions of the earth’s crust; define watershed, delta, drift, fault, glacier, terrace, stratum, dip; and identify 10 different kinds of rock and describe methods for mine ventilat-ion and safety devices.

The first mention of oil and natural gas appeared in 1927 – the mining merit badge requirement asked Scouts to “explain how we locate petroleum and natural gas pools, and how we obtain oil and gas.”

In 1945, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) formed a Committee on Boy Scout Literature at the urging of industry leaders, including A.C. Bace, a geologist with Stanolind, and George W. Pirtlem, an independent geologist from Tyler, Texas.

Oklahoma geologist Frank Gouin chaired the AAPG committee’s effort to revise the badge and its requirements, Spencer says. In 1953, the geology merit badge officially replaced the rocks and minerals badge.

Spencer notes that the 1953 badge’s description of what a geologist does said that four out of five geologists become “oil geologists” with an expected starting salary of $300 per month. “You may have to be a nomad instead of settling down for life in one spot,” it continued.

“You may have to ‘sit on’ a well all night and then drive a hundred miles to report on it. You may have to burn in India, freeze in Alaska, or do both in the Texas Panhandle.”

Although minor revisions of the geology merit badge occurred in 1957, the next major change came in 1982, adding anticlines, synclines, and faults with a requirement to draw simple diagrams showing unconformity, strikes and dips.

The last major revision of the geology merit badge occurred in 1985, Spencer says, again with the cooperation of AAPG leadership. The badge now has 13 requirements, organized under five categories: earth materials, earth processes, earth history, geology and people, and careers in geology.

The earth materials section includes the collection and identification of rocks and minerals. The earth processes section covers geomorphology, the hydrologic cycle, volcanoes, mountain building, and the ocean floor. The earth history section includes the geologic time chart, fossils, and continental drift. The geology and people section covers environmental geology and energy sources with a field trip option in this category.

In addition to its involvement in geology merit badges, AAPG and its chapters serve the scouting program in many ways, Spencer concludes. The Houston Geological Society has sponsored Explorer Posts and worked with the Houston Museum of Natural Science to teach elements of the merit badge.

Editor’s Note – The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and the need for energy conservation led to creation of an energy merit badge in 1977. Requirements include a review of energy resources, energy conservation, waste, pollution, supply and demand. In 2006, 2,506 energy merit badges were issued.

A commemorative plaque on the grounds of the Coolspring Power Museum, Coolspring, Pa., notes that the museum is part of the 2001 Mechanical Engineering Heritage Collection: 

“This is the largest collection of historically significant stationary internal combustion engines in the United States. A majority of these mechanically interesting engines were built between 1890 and 1920 and used in industrial applications. The collection documents the early history and evolution of the internal combustion engine. Many components of today's engines have their origins in the period represented by this collection.”

The Coolspring Power Museum collection in southwestern Pennsylvania’s picturesque countryside includes several hundred historic internal combustion engines—the largest in the country. 

About one-third of engines were once used in oilfields. The museum, located just off Route 36, midway between Punxsutawney to the south and Brookville to the north, was formally chartered in June 1985 as nonprofit corporation.  Member-ship has grown steadily, says President Paul E. Harvey, M.D.

Dr. Harvey lives nearby and can be found on summer afternoons mowing the museum's extensive grounds. 

Many engine enthusiasts from around the country have sent significant pieces for display, he says. The grounds, as well as semi-annual shows, have expanded with visitors from Maine to California, as well as Canada and England.

The Coolspring Power Museum’s mission is “to collect, preserve, and interpret historically significant and mechanically interesting early stationary internal combustion engines for the education and enjoyment of everyone.” 

Dr. Harvey and fellow enthusiast John Wilcox began collecting engines in the 1950s. Their collections were the basis of displays that would greatly multiply.

The museum now is housed in 13 buildings that, besides its own large collection, contain many pieces placed there on loan. Total inventory is about 250 engines with many operational. 

Dr. Harvey says the vision of Coolspring is “to be the foremost collection of early internal combustion technology presented in an educational and visitor-oriented manner and to provide an operation that will gain support and generate substantial growth.” 

The Coolspring Power Museum collection documents the early history of the internal combustion revolution.  Almost all of the critical components of today's engines have their origins in the period represented by the collection (as well as hundreds of innovations that are no longer used). 

Some of the engines represent real engineering progress; others are more the product of inventive minds avoiding previous patents. All tell a story.  

Internal combustion engines revolutionized the world around the turn of the 20th century in much the same way that steam engines did a century before. You have only to imagine a coal-fired, steam-powered, airplane to realize how important internal combustion was to the industrialized world.

While the early gas engines were more expensive than the equivalent steam engines, they did not require a boiler and were cheaper to operate. With the exception of a few items that were driven by the engines, such as compressors, pumps, and generators, and a few steam and hot air engines shown for comparison purposes, the collection contains only internal combustion engines. 

The Coolspring Power Museum collection consists of stationary engines used in industrial applications. There are only a few marine, automotive, and farm engines in the collection. 

Most of the acquisitioning efforts (those that involve substantial expenditure of funds and volunteer time) have been focused on collecting important large stationary engines...that most likely would be scrapped if the museum did not acquire them. 

Early internal combustion engines produced only a few horsepower and could not replace steam engines in most applications, but by 1890 they were powerful enough for most portable or remote operations as well as many small manufacturers. By 1900 they were replacing reciprocating steam engines for electric generation and by 1915 they were being considered for all but the largest installations where steam turbines have since dominated. — Dr. Paul E. Harvey 

Editor’s Note – The Coolspring Power Museum is located near I-80 at Clarion, Pa., exit Route 36 between Punxsutawney and Brookville.

From Vol. 5, No. 4, December 2008 Petroleum Age

“A woman with a genius for affairs – it may sound paradoxical, but the fact exists. If Mrs. Emma A. Summers were less than a genius she could not, as she does today, control the Los Angeles oil markets.”  – The San Francisco Call, July 21, 1901

She would become a lady to be reckoned with in the rough and tumble world of the Los Angeles oil patch.

Emma A. (McCutchen) Summers, a refined southern lady who graduated from Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, moved to Los Angeles in 1893 to teach piano. Summers was soon caught up in the excitement of California’s new petroleum exploration industry.

With her home not far from where Edward Doheny had discovered the Los Angeles City Field just a year before, Summers invested $700 for half interest in a well just a few blocks from Doheny’s producer.

Her well was between Court and Temple Streets, about a mile west of today’s Dodger Stadium. It didn’t go well. The casing collapsed and tools were lost, but she persevered. She borrowed another $1,800 to continue drilling the well and “Night after night, by the light of a flaring torch, she hovered over it, as if it were a sick babe’s cradle.”

Weeks dragged on as the money dwindled, but the well finally came in. Encouraged, Summers drilled another well, and another, and another. She later recalled, “When I found myself $10,000 in debt, I thought if I ever got that paid and as much more in the bank, I would be glad to quit.”

But she didn’t quit. Summers became a constant presence in the forest of oil rigs that had turned the heart of Los Angeles into a “vibrant, oil-soaked little canyon.” The population doubled between 1890 and 1900 and her oil business prospered.

By 1901, Summers was operating fourteen paying wells of her own and leasing others to meet the market demand. “It has been like this with me always,” she recalled. “I saw a chance in the oil business and sunk a well, and that carried me on and on until I couldn’t stop.”

Her wells produced 50,000 barrels each month. At first she sold her oil through local brokers, but eventually took on that challenge in addition to managing her supplies, 40 horses, 10 wagons and a blacksmith shop. Summers sold her oil to downtown hotels, factories, Pacific Light & Power Co. and railroads.

“There are men in Los Angeles who do not like Emma A. Summers” proclaimed the July 1911 issue of Sunset magazine. The former piano teacher had made enemies along the way to becoming known as the “Oil Queen of California.”

Summers expanded her holdings into real estate as World War I demand for petroleum increased her profits. She bought some of the first motion picture theaters in Los Angeles as well as apartment houses, several San Fernando Valley ranches, and a Wilshire Boulevard mansion.

As the Los Angeles oil boom waned, Summers moved into her elegant hotel appropriately named the Queen. Years later she recalled, “Oh, how scared I was sometimes! I would start in on a big deal and then get scared and wonder where I’d land. But I usually came out all right.”

Emma Summers lived out her last years at the Biltmore and Alexandria hotels. Emma Summers’ “genius for affairs” put her in control of the Los Angeles City Field’s production and earned her oil queen title. She died in a Glendale nursing home in 1941 at age 83.

Charles Duryea claimed the first U.S. patent for a gasoline automobile in 1895. Henry Ford sold his first “Quadri-cycle” in 1896. At the turn of the century, about 8,000 vehicles shared mostly unpaved roads with horses and wagons.

Of the 4,200 automobiles sold in the United States in 1900, gasoline powered less than 1,000. In November, America’s first national automobile show opened in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

An innovative assortment of electric, steam, and “internal explosion” engines powered these horseless carriages.

New manufactures like Olds Motor Works, Lansing, Mich., built models of each kind to compete in the developing market. 

Manufacturers presented 160 different vehicles at the national automobile show – and gave driving and maneuverability demonstrations on a 20-foot-wide wooden track that surrounded the exhibits. A 200-foot ramp tested hill-climbing power.

About 48,000 show visitors paid 50¢ each to see the latest automotive technology. The most popular models proved to be electric, steam, and gasoline…in that order. New Yorkers welcomed electric models as a way to reduce the estimated 450,000 tons of horse manure and 15,000 horse carcasses removed from the city’s streets each year. 

Hundreds of “Hansom” cabs built by the Electric Vehicle Co. worked well, but heavy lead-acid batteries, muddy roads, and lack of electrical infrastructure confined these early electrics to metropolitan areas. Thomas Edison spent years working on battery power for automobiles, but abandoned the effort.

Consumers favored “steamers” over their gasoline-powered competitors. Steam-powered automobiles traced their roots back to 1768, when a French military engineer, Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, built a self-propelled steam tricycle to move artillery. 

By 1900, manufacturers like Bridgeport, Connecticut-based Locomobile (from the words locomotive and automobile), Stanley Motor Carriage Co., Tarrytown, N.Y., and others boasted of their products’ safety and touted the virtues of simple steam power over “complex and sinister” internal combustion engines. 

Locomobile produced 750 steamers in 1900, second in sales only to Columbia & Electric Vehicle Co. of Hartford, Conn., but consumers complained of the time required to heat boilers and the necessarily frequent stops for water. Progress in the development of internal combustion engines soon outpaced steam technology. 

Automobiles powered by internal combustion engines at the 1900 National Automobile Show were primitive, noisy and cantankerous. Most were based on Nikoulas Otto’s 1876 four-stroke design and ran on a variety of “light spirits” such as stove gas, kerosene, naphtha, lamp oil, benzene, mineral spirits, alcohol, and gasoline. 

One early critic complained that the internal combustion engine was, “Noxious, noisy, unreliable, and elephantine. It vibrates so violently as to loosen one’s dentures. The automobile industry will surely burgeon in America, but this motor will not be a factor." 

The critic was wrong. Gasoline, once an unwanted byproduct of kerosene refining, cost only about 15 cents a gallon in 1900 and produced dramatic increases in engine horsepower. Despite the absence of “filling stations,” gasoline was readily available in a market where electric lights were making kerosene obsolete. 

The refining industry needed a product to replace kerosene and gasoline was it. In 1901, Olds Motor Works sold 425 models of a gasoline-powered “Curved Dash Runabout” for $650 each. Four years later, when the model was discontinued, almost 19,000 had been sold. America’s consumer preference for gasoline-powered internal combustion engines was thoroughly established. 

When New York City hosts its International Automobile Show in March of 2008, more than 1,000 different vehicles will be on display for an expected one million visitors. Internal combustion and hybrid gasoline-electric automobiles will be well represented. No steam-powered vehicles are expected.  

Editor’s Note – In 1906, a “Stanley Steamer” set the world land speed record at 127.7 m.p.h. – still officially recognized as the land speed record...for a steam car.

Despite efforts of the Oil 150 Steering Committee and many others, the U.S. Postal Service Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee rejected two attempts to create a sesquicentennial stamp recognizing the approaching 150th anniversary of the petroleum industry in America.

Oil 150 co-chair Rep. John E. Peterson (R-Pa.) noted that the stamp committee rejected the requests based upon “unfavorable public impressions of the modern oil industry.” 

It wasn’t always so.

On Aug. 27, 1959, U.S. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, the keynote speaker at “Oil Centennial Day” in Titusville, Pa., dedicated a four-cent commemorative postage stamp.

At the time, gasoline cost about 30 cents per gallon – and the accomplishments of the petroleum industry were cause for celebration nationwide.

“No official act could give me greater pleasure than to dedicate this stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. The American people have great reason to be indebted to this industry. It has supplied most of the power that has made the American standard of living possible,” proclaimed the Postmaster General. 

“We look to this stamp as more than a commemorative symbol. With more than 120 million stamps to be issued, it will go throughout the world as a reminder of what can be achieved by the combination of free enterprise and the vision and courage and effort of dedicated men," Summerfield added. "It will serve as a worldwide tribute to all who have brought the oil industry to its present greatness – and to its leaders who are moving with confidence to meet the challenge of the future.”

At the Drake Well Memorial Park in Titusville, popular NBC “Today” show host Dave Garroway broadcasted live as thou-sands of guests crowded the grounds. His morning program included an oil well “shooting” demonstration at the park. Featured speakers that day included Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence and Texas Railroad Commission Chairman Gen. Ernest Thompson.

According to the Titusville Herald, more centennial speeches followed the ceremony, and more than 400 guests attended a luncheon at the Titusville High School cafeteria. That evening, a 50-minute fireworks displayed capped several days of celebrating the petroleum industry – and the man who struck oil exactly 100 year earlier, forever changing America.

Although known as “Colonel” Edwin L. Drake in his day, the title originated with executives at the Seneca Oil Co., who thought it would add prestige to their speculative drilling venture. As part of the ceremonies 100 years later, the Pennsylvania National Guard formally commissioned Drake a colonel. His granddaughters, Mrs. Marie Drake Carver and Mrs. Grace Drake Kilch, accepted the commission certificate.

A year earlier, in 1958, the seven members of the newly formed Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee had finally responded to the tenacious efforts and recurring calls from a local citizens group formed as the Oil Centennial, Inc.

With support from the American Petroleum Institute (API), the Colonel Drake Philatelic Society, and several Pennsylvania oil companies, the Post Office Dept. announced the commemorative stamp in November. It was to be one of only five commemorative stamps issued that year.

Artist Robert Foster was chosen to design the stamp’s vignette. Foster, best known for his stainless steel sculpture of Mercury on the Ford Building at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, submitted several designs.

The Titusville Herald noted that one of his original designs included a representation of the Drake Well. Foster noted, “Being an artist (and a Pennsylvanian), I was so familiar with the Drake Well that I could draw it from memory, without even looking at pictures.”

The final design used a more modern drilling rig image, the Herald article noted, “because of its higher recognition value,” since many people may not know the Drake Well, but they would “recognize a modern-looking oil derrick when they see one.”

Postmaster Summerfield selected the final design and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced four plates for the stamps. The plate numbers – 26416, 26417, 26419, and 26431 – appear on blocks of the commemorative issue, known to philatelists as the plates that produced all the petroleum centennial stamps and identified as “Scott (Catalog number) 1134.”

The first day of issue, Aug. 27, 1959, saw 801,859 of the stamps mailed from and cancelled in Titusville, including many with a special cachet illustration “Born in Freedom, Working for Progress,” authorized by API and created by artist Norman Rockwell (above).

The centennial stamp prompted a broad and creative variety of these “First Day Cover” cachets. Many are popular with collectors, including State Geologist and Director of the New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources Peter Scholle, an oil patch historian (view examples of his collection here).

Almost 50 years ago, Postmaster General Summerfield concluded his remarks to the crowd in Titusville by declaring the stamp “will serve as a worldwide tribute to all who have brought the oil industry to its present greatness – and to its leaders who are moving with confidence to meet the challenge of the future.”

Perceptions may have changed since 1959, but not the world-changing significance of the discovery