Good Morning...Wildcatter Anthony Lucas hits paydirt

[Okla-homey]

Jan 10, 1901: Gusher signals start of U.S. oil industry

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110 years ago, on this day in 1901, a drilling derrick at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, produces an enormous gusher of crude oil, coating the landscape for hundreds of feet and signaling the advent of the American oil industry.

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Spindletop No. 1

The geyser was discovered at a depth of over 1,000 feet, flowed at an initial rate of approximately 100,000 barrels a day and took nine days to cap. Following the discovery, petroleum, which until that time had been used in the U.S. primarily as a lubricant and in kerosene for lamps, would become the main fuel source for new inventions such as cars and airplanes; coal-powered forms of transportation including ships and trains would also convert to the liquid fuel.

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Crude oil, which became the world's first trillion-dollar industry, is a natural mix of hundreds of different hydrocarbon compounds trapped in underground rock. The hydrocarbons were formed millions of years ago when tiny aquatic plants and animals died and settled on the bottoms of ancient waterways, creating a thick layer of organic material. Sediment later covered this material, putting heat and pressure on it and transforming it into the petroleum that comes out of the ground today.

In the early 1890s, Texas businessman and amateur geologist Patillo Higgins became convinced there was a large pool of oil under a salt-dome formation south of Beaumont. He and several partners established the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company and made several unsuccessful drilling attempts before Higgins left the company.

In 1899, Higgins leased a tract of land at Spindletop to mining engineer Anthony Lucas. The Lucas gusher blew on January 10, 1901, and ushered in the liquid fuel age. Unfortunately for Higgins, he'd lost his ownership stake by that point.

Beaumont became a "black gold" boomtown, its population tripling in three months. The town filled up with oil workers, investors, merchants and con men (leading some people to dub it "Swindletop"). Within a year, there were more than 285 actives wells at Spindletop and an estimated 500 oil and land companies operating in the area, including some that are major players today: Humble (now Exxon), the Texas Company (Texaco) and Magnolia Petroleum Company (Mobil).

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Boiler Avenue in 1903. This scene illustrates the densest drilling in Texas. By 1903, more than 400 wells had been drilled on the dome.

Spindletop experienced a second boom starting in the mid-1920s when more oil was discovered at deeper depths. In the 1950s, Spindletop was mined for sulphur. Today, only a few oil wells still operate in the area.

[texaspokieokie]

it's a shame that they wasted so much of it.

i've seen a documentary that reported oil selling for 10 cents/barrel, during the depression.

finally they developed rules (about which i know next to nothing) wells
had to be spaced so far (don't know how far) apart.

my Dad started working in oil fields, probably before WWI.

his oldest bro had a business, hauling oil field equipment, using mules.

makes me sick, when i think about how much oil was wasted during wars.

one B-29 on a bombing raid over japan used about as much fuel as i've used in my whole life.

also ,obama wastes a lot. (had to get that in)

[Taxman71]

it's a shame that they wasted so much of it.

i've seen a documentary that reported oil selling for 10 cents/barrel, during the depression.

finally they developed rules (about which i know next to nothing) wells
had to be spaced so far (don't know how far) apart.

my Dad started working in oil fields, probably before WWI.

his oldest bro had a business, hauling oil field equipment, using mules.

makes me sick, when i think about how much oil was wasted during wars.

one B-29 on a bombing raid over japan used about as much fuel as i've used in my whole life.

also ,obama wastes a lot. (had to get that in)

Someday, your grandkids or great-grandkids will say the same thing about water...."why did people water their yards 4 days a week when they only use it for an hour a week?"

[texaspokieokie]

Someday, your grandkids or great-grandkids will say the same thing about water...."why did people water their yards 4 days a week when they only use it for an hour a week?"

i won't ever have any.

[Jacie]

The story of Patillo Higgins is interesting in it's own right.

As a boy, Patillo was a hell-raiser, always getting into trouble. At the age of 17, he pulled a prank that went horribly wrong. He was racist, as a lot of people living in Texas were in 1870. One night, he and some friends crept up to a window of a local black Baptist church where a prayer meeting was going on and tossed a hornet's nest inside. As the boys ran away a deputy sheriff pursued them. The deputy pulled his pistol and fired a shot over their heads to get them to stop but accidentally hit Patillo in the arm. Patillo, who carried a pistol, returned fire and killed the deputy. Patillo was charged with murder but in a sign of the times, was acquitted by a jury that felt he acted in self-defense. However, his wounded arm became infected and had to be amputated.

The main industry in east Texas was lumber. Though he only had one arm, Patillo became a lumberjack and was ever ready to prove that he could out cuss, out drink and out fight any man with both arms. Townspeople dreaded Saturday nights when Patillo would show up at the local saloon as he would usually end up drunk and start a fight with someone.

Then one Saturday night on the way to town, Patillo passed by a church. It so happened a prayer meeting was going on, not dissimilar to events that had cost him his arm some years before. Only this time Patillo stopped to listen. Eventually he went inside and "got religion." From that day on, he became a changed man.

It was then that he left the woods and became a business man, starting a brick-making operation. The kilns that fired the bricks burned oil, which led him to take an interest in geology to understand where to find oil. At the time, the center of U.S. oil production was Pennsylvania. Higgins went there learn about oil fields and at the time the leading theory was to look for a topographic high, like a hill, to drill into for oil. Turned out, he was familiar with such a feature in east Texas called Sour Mound Hill. The name was due to the smell of sulphur that was always present. Patillo reasoned that oil was close to the surface. He obtained a lease to the area and with patrners drilled into it. Three wells failed to find anything and the partners pulled out of the company. It was then that Higgins became partners with Anthony Francis Lucas to continue the search. After the failure of yet another well, Higgins is out of the picture (except to sue later on arguing his lease was still in effect).

The day the well discovered the Spindletop field, it was a Sunday. Lucas was not present at the well having gone into town for supplies. He left a three-man crew to mind the steam engine that drove the drilling rig, which was a rotary tool as opposed to the then more common cable tool. They had surpassed a depth of 1100 feet when the men heard a noise coming from the hole. Using uncommon good sense, one of the men ran to shut down the boiler to the steam engine. That was when the men saw a sight never before witnessed. The drill pipe began to rise back of the hole, rising up several sections before bending over under it's own weight but more sections continued to come out. When all of the drill pipe was expelled from the hole there was a tremendous gush of clear fluid (water) which turned green to brown then black, jet black. They had struck oil and it was gushing 150 feet into the air at a rate of 100,000 bbl/day. The modern oil age had begun.

[OUMallen]

finally they developed rules (about which i know next to nothing) wells
had to be spaced so far (don't know how far) apart.


Depends on whether it's classified as an oil or gas well, and depends on the depth of the formation from which such well is producing. Feel free to peem me with any questions if you'd like.

[texaspokieokie]

Depends on whether it's classified as an oil or gas well, and depends on the depth of the formation from which such well is producing. Feel free to peem me with any questions if you'd like.

Thanx for offer !! i guess i don't have any questions.

my wife recently got a nice check for leasing her 20 acres in OK.
got more than twice what she paid for the land

they haven't done any drilling as of now.

may have mentioned it above. my Dad was a cable tool driller, all my life until retirement in 1961.

OK,KS & even some in AR.

[OUMallen]

That's awesome. Try to get some of that cash from her. :)

I will throw this out there: your typical natural gas formation in Oklahoma is spaced on 640 acres. (One section/one square mile) The idea is that one well can drain substantially all of its unit. However, modern drilling and modern plays precipitate that several horizontal wells might be drilled in one section to effectively drain a "tight" formation (one with low permeability/porosity, which means smaller drainage area/well). I've seen as many as 7 horizontal wells in one section in one formation. (Which to me seems like a lot, but I'm not an engineer.)

There's also another rule that's important, ie- at a deep enough depth, wellbores producing from the same formation must be 600 feet from each other or you have to ask special permission from the state. A 640-acre unit is 5280 feet across. And they don't drill the wells right on the boundary line. So 600 feet apart can cause problems if you're heavily developing the unit.

[texaspokieokie]

again, thanx for info !!
some of this i've been exposed to, but twas about 50 yrs ago.