Drilling advances

Vol. 232 No. 9

Imbibing and separating fact from fiction

Alas, physicists in Hong Kong have determined that time travel is impossible. Their study concluded that even a single photon was simply too slow-footed to ever outrun the speed of light, meaning that, unless something new comes along, we are all stuck in the here and now.

When I heard that story on a newscast, two observations instantly came to mind. One, things must really be slow in the physics business, and, two, this is a depressing development. For one thing, those blasted scientists put the kibosh on the hopes I held of someday asking executives at Western Union what in the world they were thinking in 1876 when they turned down an offer to buy Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent for a song, arguing the contraption had “too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

Those of us who are oilfield history aficionados have even more reason to wish those fantasy-pooping scientists with too much time on their hands had kept their noses out of our daydreams. How often have you wished you could pick the brains of some of the earliest pioneers or, better yet, seek out the principals and try firsthand to separate fact from folklore when it comes to the tales of drilling exploits that abound in the industry?

The early days of the industry, especially, are replete with stories of extraordinary drilling feats and just as extraordinary missteps, some of which are actually substantiated in the literature. All too often, those accounts in some way or another center on the consumption of adult beverages, and obviously the intrinsic nature of that activity makes disconnecting fact from exaggeration a tricky proposition. Consider a few examples.

Night on town opened the Permian. The Texas State Historical Association and others generally credit Big Lake field in the southwest corner of Reagan County, Texas, with spurring exploration and production in the resilient Permian basin. Not quite as corroborated is the regional tale that the field may not have been discovered or, at best, would have been delayed considerably had the drilling supervisor not decided to go into town for a few drinks, leaving the crew to its own devices.

According to the historical association, the cable-tool rig had been drilling the test well for 646 days and progress was proceeding at a snail’s pace, averaging only 4.7 ft/day. The story was picked up by the late Mody Coggin Boatright, an eminent Texas historian and folklorist at the University of Texas and the Texas Folklore Society. According to Boatright, due to the dawdling pace of drilling, the supervisor decided to take a break and go into town for few drinks. The drinking session must have continued for some time, because the crew hit the targeted depth and, with the boss not on location to order otherwise, decided to keep going. The end result was the Santa Rita-1 discovery well that blew in on May 25, 1923, from the deep Big Lime formation, well below the originally planned depth.

Besides helping make the sprawling Permian basin one of the largest producers in the US, Big Lake field was on University of Texas-owned property, and its proceeds were largely responsible for the school becoming one of the richest in the nation. The original Santa Rita-1 rig is on display at the Austin campus.

Whiskey gave Norway Ekofisk. Local industry folks I spoke with during visits to Copenhagen insist this is a true account, though I can find no credible evidence to support it. They way they tell it, long before there was any hint that oil was beneath the Norwegian or Danish sectors of the North Sea, emissaries of both countries were immersed in negotiations to redefine their respective aquatic boundaries. At stake were rich fishing grounds.

With talks at a stalemate, local lore has the enterprising Norwegian negotiator presenting his Danish counterpart what he learned was the Dane’s favorite alcoholic libation. The boundary dispute supposedly was settled very shortly thereafter and, in 1969, the portion awarded to Norway became home to the giant Ekofisk field, which is still producing 42 years later. One would hope the inducement was at least more than a single bottle.

Meeting in bar transformed drilling. Howard Hughes, Sr., is rightly credited as the father of roller-cone drill bit technology, which revolutionized the oil and gas industry. Not as widely reported, but nevertheless documented, is the genesis of his invaluable creation in a Shreveport, Louisiana, bar.

While Hughes and partner Walter Sharp were trying to develop an alternative for the terribly inefficient fishtail bit, he met one Granville Humason, who had devised a crude bit model made of spools. The spools formed two cone-shaped cutters that continued rotating once they touched a surface. Hughes was the only one offered the rights to the rudimentary tool, who believed that, with some major tweaking, it would be answer he had been seeking.

Hughes biographers say he met Humason in the Louisiana bar in 1908 and bought the rights to the model for $150. After overhauling the concept into a patentable version with multiple cutters, Hughes was awarded a US patent on Aug. 10, 1909, and the rest is history.

Humason was said to be so overjoyed that someone finally took an interest in his unrefined creation that he proceeded to spend $50 of his new bounty on his bar tab that night. Credible evidence supporting this account came straight from the horse’s mouth: The University of Texas’ Center for American History has a rare audio recording of Humason’s recollections of that evening. While I find it difficult to wrap my mind around what $50 in 1908 is worth in today’s dollars, suffice it to say that would have been one spirited drinking session!