History of Oil
Beyond Sight
of Land
Oil exploration moved from the land to the sea only a few years
after Titusville. Here we take a look at how ofshore oil exploration
in the Gulf of Mexico developed from 1869 to the early 1960s.
Library of Congress
QUENTIN MORTON
Oil wells in the ocean and on the shore, California, 1947.
60 GEOExPro
June 2016
United States Patent and Trademark Office
In the days before underwater probes and 3D imaging, the oil
pioneer had to visualize how the oil-rich rock formations of
the land extended under the sea. As E.W. Owen’s Trek of the
Oil Finders observed, “no evidence suggested that the present
shoreline constituted the boundary of a separate structural
province”. But as the search for submarine oil in the United
States moved from an exploration of its lakes and marshlands
to its shorelines and shallow marine waters, and then beyond
sight of land, so the risks increased accordingly – the sheltered
bays and creeks of the coast were relatively benign when
compared with the perils of open water.
Early Pioneers
In 1869, only ten years after Col. Edwin Drake irst struck oil
at Titusville, Pennsylvania, homas Rowlands took oil well
design a step further by adapting it for use at sea, obtaining
a patent for what he called a ‘submarine oil drill’. he rig was
designed for drilling in shallow water, and its appearance –
with four telescopic legs resting on the seabed – resembled
a modern jack-up rig. Bearing in mind that ofshore drilling
would not become a serious commercial activity for many
years to come, Rowlands’ invention was remarkable indeed.
In 1891, following the discovery of oil in the Trenton
limestone reservoirs, oilmen reached Grand Lake St. Marys, a
shallow man-made lake in Ohio known locally as the Reservoir.
A decision was made to drill on the lake but, while drilling wells
on land was familiar practice, techniques for drilling in water
were as yet unproven. In the event, pilings were driven into the
bedrock under the lake to create ‘cribs’ on which cable-tool rigs
were mounted. But it was in California that marine drilling
truly began. In 1896 Henry L. Williams and his associates,
having drilled three wells on the shore at Summerland, built
a pier 90m out into the Paciic and placed a cable-tool rig on
the end of it. here followed 400 wells, and the ofshore ield
continued to produce oil for the next 25 years.
he system of piers, or trestles, irst used at Summerield,
was still in evidence in the 1940s. In Baku, for example,
extensive trestle systems were employed to extend drilling
into the Caspian Sea. Elsewhere, there were many variations.
On Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, where oil had been apparent
to Europeans since Spanish sailors arrived in the 16th century,
attempts to use wooden structures as drilling platforms had
been abandoned after marine termites bored into them, even
when they were coated with creosote. hey were replaced
by concrete pilings, leading the operator, Creole Petroleum,
to construct 106 drilling platforms on the lake. Drilling on
Lake Caddo, on the border between Louisiana and Texas, had
resulted in a spread of activity across the wetlands and bayous
of Louisiana, with numerous reinements such as platforms
made of oyster shells, sunken barges and timber-plank roads
built over the water. However, the Great Depression of 1929
brought a worldwide slump and a decline in exploration.
Wind, Waves and Weather
he Gulf of Mexico was an intriguing prospect. For years,
the Texas and Louisiana coastlands had yielded rich pickings
for oil prospectors: its situation on the continental margin
provided near-perfect conditions for the laying down of
Rowlands’ 1869 patent for a ‘submarine oil drill’.
oil-rich sediments over millions of years, and its salt plugs
and anticlines provided ideal hydrocarbon traps. In 1938,
an American company, Humble Oil, had built into the sea a
mile-long wooden trestle with railway tracks and ending with
a derrick, at McFadden Beach on the Gulf of Mexico, but in
August 1938 a hurricane severely damaged the pier and drilling
platform. he company bowed to the inevitable and abandoned
the costly operation without inding commercial oil.
Meanwhile, in 1937 two independent irms, Superior Oil of
California and Pure Oil, had built a large platform 2 km from
the shore at a depth of 4m. With 300 piles of yellow pine driven
into the seabed, it was designed to withstand hurricane-force
winds. he platform was built 4.5m above the sea so that if very
high waves should impact the rig, the platform would detach
from the pilings, thus avoiding the loss of the whole structure.
In fact, this happened in 1940 when a hurricane swept the deck
and damaged piles, but workers were soon able to rebuild it. he
fact that this, the Creole ield, was successful vindicated the risk
GEOExPro
June 2016
61
DeGolyer Library, SMU
of the venture, but the disadvantages of having such large, ixed
platforms remained. hey were costly to build and, if the well
proved dry, those costs were not recovered.
And yet the high cost of drilling at sea encouraged
innovation, resulting in a number of new techniques that
transformed ofshore drilling. Drilling narrower (‘slim’)
exploratory holes brought a switch from steam to diesel-electric
rigs; and rather than drilling single wells vertically from a
central platform, oil companies such as Pure and Superior
embarked on directional drilling, which enabled several wells to
be drilled from a single platform. A novel procedure at the time,
it would become an industry standard in future years.
Kerr-McGee Oil Industries and Humble adopted a diferent
approach, building smaller platforms which housed the drilling
equipment, with the living quarters located on tenders –
ex-World War II landing craft with their engines removed. If a
well came in dry, the tender could simply be towed to another
site, thus reducing the cost of each well. his coniguration did
bring its own problems, however. It was diicult for workers
to climb onto the platform in rough weather – so much so
that the bridge they crossed was christened the ‘widow maker’.
Shrimp-boat captains were often hired to bring crews from the
shore only to ind that the sea state was too rough to allow them
to board the platform or the tender alongside. Even locating
these platforms at sea could be challenging in adverse weather
conditions without the beneit of modern navigational aids.
And in harsh weather the tenders could break loose from their
moorings and, having no engines, smash into the platforms.
hrough a process of design and experiment, trial and
error, the challenges of open water were largely overcome.
Hurricanes remained a constant seasonal threat in the Gulf
of Mexico, but structures were getting stronger. Lack of
knowledge about weather was being remedied by a growing
number of navigational aids and weather forecasting systems.
he US Pioneers Corps had specialized in wind, tides and
other weather forecasting for the seaborne landings of World
War II, and this knowledge was transferred to the ofshore oil
industry in peacetime. he American Petroleum Institute also
started collating information, giving the operators of marine
rigs more tools to predict the weather and evacuate the rigs in
the event of an impending storm.
DeGolyer Library, SMU
History of Oil
A Shell Oil seismic vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, April 1951.
The Application of Science
Meanwhile, there were new developments on land. First
magnetic surveys, then gravity and electrical methods were
used to map the subsurface – but it was the advent of seismic
techniques that transformed oil prospecting, both on land and
sea. In 1938 Shell Oil started experimenting with seismic testing
of the Louisiana coast, where a ‘shooting’ boat would drop a
single stick of dynamite into the sea and measure the seismic
waves with geophones on the seabed. Six years later, Superior Oil
and Mobil followed their example in order to look for salt domes
using much the same arrangements. Kerr-McGee used shooting
boats that would circle the recording boat, setting of charges
at regular intervals. By 1947, all the equipment – shooting and
recording – was housed on a single boat.
After World War II, many of the independent oil companies
that had been excluded from land-based exploration by leases
granted to the oil majors took advantage of the new technology
to extend their operations ofshore in the Gulf of Mexico. he
problem of drilling at depth remained. A number of diferent
designs were tried: submerging a loating barge at the site to
provide a base for a drilling rig, with a platform above the
surface; small, ixed platforms without living quarters; and
Oil well drilling rig with supply boat, Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, of the coast of Louisiana, April 1949.
62 GEOExPro
April
June 2016
DeGolyer Library, SMU
larger submersible platforms.
he new seismic techniques revealed many salt domes in
the Gulf, prime objects for further investigation. Creeping
towards deeper water continued. In 1946, Magnolia Petroleum
demonstrated that it was possible to drill beyond the three
nautical miles (5.5 km) of territorial waters. In October 1947,
another milestone was reached when Kerr-McGee drilled the
irst discovery well out of sight of land, a ixed platform at a
water depth of 5.5m, some 16 km from the shore. By 1948, 24
operations were taking place beyond the three-mile limit and, a
year later, a mobile ofshore rig was launched. In 1954 the irst
jack-up rig arrived – in time, this type of rig would be able to
drill in water 90m deep.
Into Deeper Water
In 1945, after shortages of oil during the war, the US Congress
investigated petroleum resources. On 28 September, President
Truman proclaimed the United States’ right to exploit its
continental shelf, extending its jurisdiction well beyond the
traditional three-mile territorial limit. He stated that the
United States regarded as part of its jurisdiction the natural
resources of the subsoil and seabed of its entire continental
shelf (deined as the area up to a water depth of 180m).
In the Tidelands controversy, a series of legal proceedings
arising from a dispute between the United States and Texas, the
limits of state and federal ownership over the three-mile wide
marginal sea was established. In 1953 the Submerged Lands Act
was passed, recognizing state ownership of the minerals and
resources of the marginal sea to their historic boundaries, with
the remainder owned by the federal government. Legal challenges followed over many years, the last being settled in 1963.
Today, ofshore oil is a worldwide industry exploring to everincreasing depths. he real breakthrough came in 1962 with
Shell’s semi-submersible rig, Blue Water 1, which was the irst
rig to be detached from the seabed, relying on a mooring system
of eight anchors to keep it steady in the water. his, together
Workers guiding the bottom hole assembly with stabilizer and new rock
drill bit on an ofshore drilling platform, 1955.
with remote wellhead assembly on the sea loor, opened up the
possibility of drilling and maintaining wells in deepwater. At
present in the Gulf of Mexico there are 15 structures operating
in water depths greater than 304m. In 2005, the Discoverer
Spirit drillship drilled the Stones-2 well to a true vertical depth
of 8,705m in a water depth of 2,919m, an achievement that
would have surely amazed the early ofshore pioneers.
Acknowledgement: he author would like to thank Dr Alan
Heward and Peter Morton for their kind assistance.
Christopher Griner
The ofshore drillship Deep Ocean Ascension anchored of Cape Town awaiting transit to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, 2010.
GEOExPro
June 2016
63