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View Full Version : Good Morning...Black Gold Discovered in the Quaker State



Okla-homey
8/27/2006, 08:00 AM
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August 27, 1859 Black Gold!

(this "Good Morning" offering was originally broadcast on Aug 27 2005. It has been enhanced to include new material and has been formatted to fit your screen)

147 years ago today, Edwin Drake's primitive well came in when it struck oil at 69 feet near Titusville in Crawford County in the northwest corner of the Quaker State --and in so doing, became the driller of the world's first successful oil well.

Edwin Drake was an unemployed train conductor when the Seneca Oil Company hired him - at $85.00 a month - to prospect their property in western Pennsylvania. What that meant in those days was simply wandering around the countryside looking for pools of oil that had percolated to the surface.

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Drake had a novel idea, he decided to try drilling for oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania - an original concept at the time - and struck a veritable ocean of the black gold. Within months, fortunes were being made by those savvy enough to exploit the new "Oildorado."

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Edwin Drake

Drake was not one of them. Drake's discovery fueled revolutions in transportation and industry - and made billionaires out of men like J. Paul Gettyand John D. Rockefeller- but the oil industry refused to give Drake even the most meager pension.

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Drake's well and his roughnecks

Drake chose not to seek a US patent for his critical invention -- the pipe casing for the bore hole, which would have ensured his financial well-being. He did so out of loyalty to his former employer Seneca Oil, reasoning it wouldn't be ethical for him to patent an item he developed on the job while in their employ.

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To make Drake's fortunes worse, the ever increasing supply of oil drove the price down. When Drakes well hit, crude was selling at $22bbl. Two years later, it was down to .52bbl.:eek: The market became so volatile, Drake left the oil business. He later lost everything in bad oil stock investments he made NYC.

Drake then drifted around for several years, suffering from injuries he sustained in the Pennsylvania oil patch.

The State of Pennsylvania eventually took pity on him and awarded him a meager $1500.00 annuity in 1870 in the last decade of his life. He died in relative poverty in 1880 in Bethlehem PA, after years of crippling illnesses.

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Little Titusville PA is still proud of their community's role in the development of a ginormous international industry.

A quarter century after Drake's death, the big oil companies dug up his corpse and enshrined it in a gaudy tomb. They paid more for Drake's headstone than they ever paid Drake when he was alive.

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Ed's well in the Pennsylvania woods, painting from an original photo.

This source of crude oil, or petroleum, opened up a new inexpensive source of power and quickly replaced whale oil in lamps -- it also took a lot of pressure off the giant marine mammals which were getting quite scarce, especially the sperm and right whales which were the most hunted oil-bearing whale species. Your correspondent has no idea why "sperm" whales are called that, but right whales are called "right" whales precisely because they were the "right" whale to hunt being particularly rich in the valuable whale oil.

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Unfortunately, despite the fact right whales are no longer hunted for their oil for use in lamps, our Japanese friends like to eat them, and they are just about gone.

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Not much has changed in the mechanics of oil wells, although they go much deeper than Ed's 69 foot well nowadays. Of course, Ed couldn't possibly have imagined off shore drilling and the fact one day, we'd go back to the sea for oil, but not to chase whales.

Within a few decades of Drake's discovery, oil drilling was widespread in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the East Indies. However, it was the development of the automobile that catapulted petroleum into a position of paramount importance, for petroleum is the primary source of gasoline. Asphalt, also derived from petroleum, is used to surface roads and highways.

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When the price of a barrel of crude goes up, of course, so does everything that depends on the various products derived from that barrel.

Just about everyone agrees human civilization needs to do something to lessen our dependence on petroleum products, the problem is, there just aren't any feasible, suitable and acceptable alternatives out there right now.

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SoonerBorn68
8/27/2006, 08:12 AM
the problem is, there just aren't any feasible, suitable and acceptable alternatives out there right now.

...and I'm cool with that for the time being. :D

Great article as usual, Homey!

SoonerBorn68
8/27/2006, 08:13 AM
heh, hit oil at 69 ft. This morning we reached 9700 ft. We'll be done at 11967. How times have changed.

soonerjoker
8/27/2006, 09:27 AM
i bet drake's rig was more like a "cable tool" than today's "rotary" rigs.

Frozen Sooner
8/27/2006, 11:26 AM
In the interest of giving some knowledge back to Homey...

When the head of a sperm whale is cut open, a milky-white substance comes out. It was originally thought that sperm whales stored their, well, sperm in their heads.

It was later determined that this was not, in fact, sperm.

Old-timey whalers had some weird ideas about reproduction, I guess.

The sperm whale (also known as the Cachalot) is the largest toothed mammal on Earth.

Okla-homey
8/27/2006, 11:41 AM
In the interest of giving some knowledge back to Homey...

When the head of a sperm whale is cut open, a milky-white substance comes out. It was originally thought that sperm whales stored their, well, sperm in their heads.

It was later determined that this was not, in fact, sperm.

Old-timey whalers had some weird ideas about reproduction, I guess.

The sperm whale (also known as the Cachalot) is the largest toothed mammal on Earth.

Cool knowlege. seriously.

But, do cachalots swim near Camelot and send spamalot?:D

Okla-homey
8/27/2006, 11:42 AM
i bet drake's rig was more like a "cable tool" than today's "rotary" rigs.

'splain please for us non-oilpatch-types.

Frozen Sooner
8/27/2006, 11:43 AM
Heh. We can only hope.

I think "cachalot" comes from either latin or greek for "big head." Sperm whales have ENORMOUS heads.

Skysooner
8/27/2006, 12:10 PM
Easy on the explanation. When you are drilling a hole in the ground, the trick gets to be to remove the stuff from the hole as you drill it. A rotary uses a bit (essentially 3 cones with teeth on them) to break up the rock. Through this bit runs 3 nozzles. Oil mud (water plus chemicals) is pumped down through the interior of the pipe, and it sprays out the nozzles. This helps to further break up the material that has been ground up by the bit. The oil mud also carries the "cuttings" out of the well as it is circulated up between the formation and the pipe on the bit.

Cable tool rigs used essentially a bit that was dropped on a cable line. The bit would grind up the rock. Eventually the bottom of the hole got plugged (about every 3 feet), and a "bailer" or essentially a shovel on a cable was lowered into the well, and the cuttings would be picked up by this bailer. There is much more to it than that, but you can see that a rotary is much more efficient as you are continuously drilling and lifting material out of the well.

Okla-homey
8/27/2006, 12:24 PM
Easy on the explanation. When you are drilling a hole in the ground, the trick gets to be to remove the stuff from the hole as you drill it. A rotary uses a bit (essentially 3 cones with teeth on them) to break up the rock. Through this bit runs 3 nozzles. Oil mud (water plus chemicals) is pumped down through the interior of the pipe, and it sprays out the nozzles. This helps to further break up the material that has been ground up by the bit. The oil mud also carries the "cuttings" out of the well as it is circulated up between the formation and the pipe on the bit.

Cable tool rigs used essentially a bit that was dropped on a cable line. The bit would grind up the rock. Eventually the bottom of the hole got plugged (about every 3 feet), and a "bailer" or essentially a shovel on a cable was lowered into the well, and the cuttings would be picked up by this bailer. There is much more to it than that, but you can see that a rotary is much more efficient as you are continuously drilling and lifting material out of the well.

Thanks. Courtesy the power of the innerweb, these are Drake's tools.

Looks like that one with the flat head (first from the top) was prolly just spun huh? The whole shebang was powered by a six hp steam engine set-up in the shack next to the hole.

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Skysooner
8/27/2006, 12:32 PM
I'm not sure whether it was spun or not. I would think it would have just fitted on a crossover that threaded onto the end and the eye would hook into the cable. Rotaries came along much later after they developed the way to transfer power from an engine to rotating the pipe. Rotary is more efficient but can also cause you more problems since there is so much pipe in the hole that can get stuck. Makes getting it out much more difficult.

There are still some cable tool rigs around for shallow drilling jobs though. I remember visiting an old oil field in the Arbuckles, and they were powering about 10 pumping units off of one central engine. They used sucker rods threaded together and run through poles with eyelets over the ground to drive the individual pumping units. They had some really good ways of doing things back in the older days. I still wonder how they managed to be as efficient as they were. Of course pollution was a real problem.

Up near Tonkawa, there is a huge dead area that is considered a Superfund site. They used to produce thousands of barrels a day, and they would literally flow it into a local dry riverbed that would fill these pools near the railroad. They would then pump it into the railroad tank cars and haul it to the refineries at Ponca City and other places.

12
8/27/2006, 01:05 PM
Another tidbit... the rotary bit was invented by Howard Robard Hughes, Sr. He had a Kleenex box-wearin' son that was famous for doing stuff too.

Okla-homey
8/27/2006, 01:07 PM
Another tidbit... the rotary bit was invented by Howard Robard Hughes, Sr. He had a Kleenex box-wearin' son that was famous for doing stuff too.

Hughes Tool Co.;)

soonerjoker
8/29/2006, 09:55 AM
Homey

i feel sure that the "bits" shown in the photo are of the "cable tool" type. up & down motion.

i don't know much, but i have been around "cable-tool" rigs; my Dad was a cable tool driller. he retired in 1961, after about 45 yrs working in oil fields.

ref. movie "oklahoma crude, there is cable tool rig.

bad thing about "rotary rig", when you get down about 30,000 ft. (rare) it
takes 2 or 3 days to change bit. don't think cable tools went much over 5000 ft; & are not nearly as fast as rotaries.

Okla-homey
8/29/2006, 04:50 PM
Homey

i feel sure that the "bits" shown in the photo are of the "cable tool" type. up & down motion.

i don't know much, but i have been around "cable-tool" rigs; my Dad was a cable tool driller. he retired in 1961, after about 45 yrs working in oil fields.

ref. movie "oklahoma crude, there is cable tool rig.

bad thing about "rotary rig", when you get down about 30,000 ft. (rare) it
takes 2 or 3 days to change bit. don't think cable tools went much over 5000 ft; & are not nearly as fast as rotaries.

So it just hammers its way down like a jackhammer?

soonerjoker
8/31/2006, 09:46 AM
yep, that's about it.

Skysooner
8/31/2006, 10:20 AM
That is why it was only good for 3 feet of penetration or so. Beyond that it had no ability to reach uncut rock.

Petro-Sooner
8/31/2006, 10:21 AM
Cool thread Homey

soonerjoker
9/1/2006, 09:28 AM
SkySooner

don't understand your comment ??

is it a joke ???