A Two pronged Wooden Fork

By davidbunch

At the end of World War I the price of crude oil stood at $6.10 per barrel. It has never equalled that figure since. Nevertheless, American crude producers had the inside track on its production. As our civilisation moved west, new fields were discovered. Oil wells drilled since 1859 have exceeded 811,000. Many were what the wildcatter called dry holes, or failures; but at the end of 1944 there were somewhere in the neighbourhood of 411.000 producing wells, or about twice as many as at the end of 1918. The wildcatter of oil magnate Colonel Drake´s day hired a diviner to find the proper place to start drilling a well. The diviner generally had enough common sense to make certain that there were 'burning springs.' or evidence of petroleum seepage, in the neighbourhood. Then he went along with a two-pronged wooden fork upon which was suspended by a string anything from a can of water to his false teeth. When it dipped, either because the diviner hiccuped or grew tired of carrying the stick, he said that it marked the precise spot to start drilling.

It was a haphazard method of locating a petroleum-producing anticline, but it was often successful. The wand waving was largely hocus-pocus. In these days the wildcatter hires geologists, who conduct costly surveys to locate the precise spot that might he over the dome of an oil pool. It is then necessary to drill down anywhere from 100 to 15,000 feet to locate this reservoir. There is a general feeling in the oil industry that there may be oil deposits even below the 15,000-foot level.

What is petroleum? It is generally agreed to be marine animal and vegetable matter that accumulated millions of years ago in a depression on the floor of some great body of water. As time went along, layers of rock and shale covered the deposit. The organic matter was then slowly transformed into oil by long, continued heat and pressure, aided by decomposition and bacterial action.

Despite the fact that the oil man often speaks of “bringing in new pools of oil,” deposits are, in fact, contained in porous or sponge-like beds of limestone or sandstone. Practically all deposits of oil are accompanied by natural gases, which originated from the same organic matter as the oil. In a majority of cases deposits of crude oil are surrounded or underlain Hy water, usually under pressure. Therefore, tbe oil well is not like a cistern with walls. It cannot be operated steadily to the last drop. Petroleum must ooze out of the surrounding sandstone or limestone into the well, and oozing requires time. If the well is worked or produced—the latter term is preferred by oil men—too rapidly, little of ´he crude oil in the 'pool' is obtained. Today, through recent improvements in production methods, it is possible to extract all but about 30 percent out of Nature´s deposit.

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