Ever since the earliest U.S. oil discoveries, detonating dynamite or nitroglycerin downhole helped increase a well’s production. The geologic “fracking” technology commonly used in oilfields after the Civil War would be significantly enhanced when hydraulic fracturing arrived in 1949. 

Modern hydraulic fracturing — popularly known as petroleum well “fracking” — can trace its roots to April 1865, when Civil War Union veteran Lt. Col. Edward A. L. Roberts received the first of his many patents for an “exploding torpedo.”

In May 1990, Pennsylvania’s Otto Cupler Torpedo Company “shot” its last oil well with liquid nitroglycerin as the company abandoned using nitro while continuing to pursue a fundamental oilfield technology. Company President Rick Tallini credited Col. Roberts’ original patents for leading to modern fracturing systems.

As a Union Lieutenant Colonel in December 1862, E.A.L. Roberts “conceived the idea of opening the veins and crevices in oil-bearing rock by exploding an elongated shell or torpedo therein.” Images courtesy Drake Well Museum, Early Days of Oil, Princeton University Press.

When the Roberts patent expired in 1883, his company was sold to former employee Adam Cupler Jr., who died in a 1903 nitro explosion. The Cupler Torpedo Company became the Otto Cupler Torpedo Company in 1937 after Otto Torpedo Company purchased it.

“Our business since Colonel Roberts’ day has concerned lowering high explosives charges into oil wells in the Appalachian area to blast fractures into the oil-bearing sand,” Tallini said, adding that Col. Roberts’ torpedo company operated in the Allegheny region of Titusville — where the U.S. petroleum industry began in August 1859 with the first American well specifically drilled for oil.

The Civil War veteran’s explosive method for fracking wells in oil-bearing geologic formations would be adopted throughout the Pennsylvania oil regions (sometimes illegally) and in other states making their first oil discoveries.

Civil War Veteran’s Torpedo Company

Civil War veteran Col. Edward E.A.L. Roberts led a New Jersey regiment at the bloody 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Amid the chaos of the battle, he saw the results of explosive Confederate artillery rounds plunging into the narrow millrace (canal) that obstructed the battlefield.

When Col. E.A.L. Roberts founded his oil well service company in 1865, his many patents gave him a monopoly on torpedoes for downhole fracturing.

Despite heroic actions during the battle, he was cashiered from the Union Army in 1863. But the Virginia battlefield observation inspired the idea that would evolve into what he described as “superincumbent fluid tamping.”

Roberts received his first patent for an “Improvement in Exploding Torpedoes in Artesian Wells” on April 25, 1865. His oilfield invention of fracturing to improve a well would vastly improve oil production from America’s young petroleum industry. Many more of the technology patents would follow.

The Roberts torpedo system eclipsed earlier oilfield methods, including black powder or dropping sticks of dynamite down a well, which often collapsed boreholes and ruined production. The same month Roberts received his first exploding torpedo patent, a stage actor failed in a well dynamiting attempt.

In June 1864, John Wilkes Booth left Pennsylvania’s oilfields after a botched fracturing attempt at an oil well drilled by his Dramatic Oil Company.

Tamped with water, early torpedoes were set off by “go devils,” a weight dropped along a suspension wire.

Roberts received another U.S. Patent (No. 59,936) in November 1866. This improved device would become widely known as the Roberts Torpedo.

By filling the borehole with water before detonating his torpedo, Roberts greatly advanced the U.S. oil industry’s production technology. The column of water above the explosive device more effectively shattered rock formations at the oil-producing depths of wells.

“Shooting” Oil Wells

The Titusville Morning Herald newspaper reported, Our attention has been called to a series of experiments that have been made in the wells of various localities by Col. Roberts, with his newly patented torpedo. The results have in many cases been astonishing.

The torpedo, which is an iron case containing an amount of powder varying from fifteen to twenty pounds, is lowered into the well, down to the spot, as near as can be ascertained, where it is necessary to explode it.  It is then exploded by means of a cap on the torpedo, connected with the top of the shell by a wire.

Filling the borehole with water provided Roberts with the important “fluid tamping” to concentrate the concussion and more efficiently fracture surrounding oil strata.

The new downhole technology had an immediate impact — petroleum production from some wells increased 1,200 percent within a week of being shot — and the Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company flourished thanks to the inventor’s exclusive patent.

Roberts charged $100 to $200 per torpedo and a royalty of one-fifteenth of the increased flow of oil. Attempting to avoid Roberts’ fees, some oilmen hired unlicensed practitioners who operated by “moonlight” with their own devices. The inventor was outraged.

Roberts hired Pinkerton detectives and lawyers to protect his patent — and is said to have been responsible for more civil litigation in defense of a patent than anyone in U.S. history. The inventor spent years and more than $250,000 to stop the unlawful “torpedoists” or “moonlighters.”

Pouring nitroglycerin into a canister prior to the “shooting” of a well drilled using a cable-tool rig.

Applied legally or illegally, by 1868, nitroglycerin was preferred to black powder, despite its frequently fatal tendency to detonate accidentally.

“A flame or a spark would not explode Nitro-Glycerin readily, but the chap who struck it a hard rap might as well avoid trouble among his heirs by having had his will written and a cigar-box ordered to hold such fragments as his weeping relatives could pick from the surrounding district,” noted John J. McLauren in 1896 in his book Sketches in Crude Oil — Some Accidents and Incidents of the Petroleum Development in all parts of the Globe.

Pouring nitroglycerin was risky enough; doing it for an illegal well “shooting” led to the term “moonlighting.”

Roberts died a wealthy man on March 25, 1881, in Titusville. His heirs sold Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company to its employees, who continued in business as the Independent Explosives Company. By then, the Civil War Union veteran’s revolutionary “fracking” technology was being applied by the petroleum industry worldwide. 

Otto Cupler Torpedo Company

Rick Tallini’s historic Otto Cupler Torpedo Company at one time produced its own nitroglycerin in plants near Titusville — until the last of the company’s plants exploded in 1978. They continued using liquid nitroglycerin for more than a decade. Then the company’s final nitroglycerine supplier’s plant exploded in Moosic, Pennsylvania, in 1990.

A century earlier, farther east of the oilfields at Oil City and Titusville (and the notorious boom town of Pithole), the giant Bradford oilfield had its own nitroglycerine manufacturers and fracturing service companies. A notable fracturing operation there was run by an astute businesswoman (see Mrs. Alford’s Nitro Factory).

A 1948 Dodge Power Wagon on loan to the Drake Well Museum until 2022 once hauled hundreds of pounds of liquid nitroglycerin in ten-quart copper cans. In 1990, the Department of Transportation ended the hauling liquid nitroglycerin over roadways. Photo by Bruce Wells.

Tallini’s final well shooting on May 5, 1990, used up the last of his company’s liquid nitro reserves of nitroglycerine. His company would continue shooting wells, but with safer, modern explosives and procedures. The Otto Cupler Company preserved many documents from its earliest downhole detonations.

In 2024, E&K Equipment of Titusville donated its Otto-Cupler Torpedo Company nitro truck to the Drake Well Museum and Park in Titusville. The 1978 Chevrolet K20 3/4 ton truck display will replace an Otto Cupler 1948 Dodge on loan for display loaned from 2008 to 2022. The museum continues to host popular “Nitro Shows” for school groups.

Indian Territory Well

At the end of the 19th century in Indian Territory, a crowd gathered outside Bartlesville to watch a well fracturing. A Delaware Indian — the driller’s stepdaughter — dropped a weighted device known as a “Go Devil” down a wireline. Its impact set off the well’s canister of nitroglycerin.

The 1897 nitro-fracturing of the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 well resulted in a geyser of “black gold” that launched Oklahoma’s petroleum industry a decade before statehood (see First Oklahoma Oil Well).

Another oilfield innovation was firing bullets at several levels through a borehole’s casing to enhance the flow of oil from producing geologic formations.

Ira McCullough, a veteran of Los Angeles oilfields, in 1939 received a U.S. patent for his design of a multiple-bullet-shot perforator using “projectiles or perforating elements” that are shot through casing into the formation (see Downhole Bazooka). 

Hydraulic “Fracking”

On March 17, 1949, a team of petroleum production experts converged on an oil well about 12 miles east of Duncan, Oklahoma, to perform the first commercial application of hydraulic fracturing. Later that day, Halliburton and Stanolind company personnel successfully fractured another oil well near Holliday, Texas.

The first commercial hydraulic fracturing of an oil well on March 17, 1949, east of Duncan, Okla.

A fracking well experiment two years earlier in Hugoton, Kansas — home of a massive natural gas field — had proven the possibility of hydraulic fracturing for increased gas well productivity. Erle Halliburton (1892-1957) patented an improved method for cementing oil wells in 1921, two years after founding his well service company in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

By 1988, the technology will have been applied nearly one million times. The technique had been developed and patented by Stanolind (later known as the Pan American Oil Company), and an exclusive license was issued to Halliburton to perform the process. The license was extended to all qualified service companies in 1953.

To complete a well, a wireline lowers explosive charges to perforate the steel casing, cement, and oil-bearing formations. After the charges are electronically fired, hydraulic fracturing begins.

According to a spokesman from Pinnacle, a Halliburton service company:

Since that fateful day in 1949, hydraulic fracturing has done more to increase recoverable reserves than any other technique, and Halliburton has led the industry in developing and applying fracturing technology.

The company representative also noted, “In the more than 60 years following those first treatments, more than two million fracturing treatments have been pumped with no documented case of any treatment polluting an aquifer — not one.”

An Erle Halliburton statue was dedicated in 1993 in Duncan, Oklahoma.

Issues concerning water withdrawals for hydraulic fracturing, spills during the handling of fracturing fluids, and injection of the fluids with inadequate mechanical integrity were among issues raised by the Environmental Protection Agency in its 2016 report, Hydraulic Fracturing For Oil And Gas.

American Shale Revolution 

In the 1980s, a sudden technological advance in fracturing shale formations led to the United States vastly increasing its oil and especially natural gas production. The nation became the world’s top producer of natural gas in 2009 and the top oil producer in 2018. 

Although credit should be shared with others, America’s first “shale boom” began with the innovative thinking of independent producers, especially a Texan from Galveston, George P. Mitchell (1919 – 2013). Shale fracturing advancements began with steering a well horizontally into petroleum-producing geological formations.

In the 1980s, Mitchell Energy & Development began experimenting with hydraulic fracturing in horizontal wells in the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth. The company was among the few that began finding ways to extract large amounts of natural gas from shale formations.

Natural Gas

On March 6, 1981, Mitchell Energy drilled its C.W. Slay No. 1 well, the first commercial natural gas well of the Barnett shale formation. Over the next four years, the vertical well produced nearly a billion cubic feet of gas, but it would take almost two decades to perfect cost-effective shale fracturing methods — and combine them with horizontal drilling.

The 7,500-foot-deep Wise County well and others that followed in North Texas helped evaluate seismic and fracturing data to understand deep shale structures.

“The C.W. Slay No. 1 and the subsequent wells drilled into the Barnett formation laid the foundation for the shale revolution, proving that natural gas could be extracted from the dense, black rock thousands of feet underground,” the Dallas Morning News later declared.

More innovations came as geologists recognized the potential of natural gas-rich shales in Arkansas (Fayetteville formation) and in Pennsylvania and nearby states (the Marcellus). In the Williston Basin of North Dakota, producing oil since 1951, billions of barrels of new production came from the Bakken shale (see First North Dakota Oil Well).

America’ shale revolution would end decades of dependence on foreign oil and natural gas supplies.

America’s modern shale boom began in the 1980s when independent producers like George Mitchell experimented with ways to produce natural gas from the Barnett shale in Texas. May 2011 map courtesy Energy Information Administration.

By the end of 2012, with almost 14,000 wells drilled in the Barnett shale — the largest gas field in Texas — production began to decline, but the field still accounted for 6.1 percent of Texas natural gas production, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Injected Wastewater and Earthquakes

The largest earthquake in Oklahoma known to be induced by a process related to hydraulic fracturing came in 2019, according to the United States Geological Survey. USGS studies confirmed the majority of the state’s earthquakes for the previous decade resulted from injected wastewater methods — not well fracturing fluids. 

“Wastewater disposal is a ​separate ​process in which fluid waste from oil and gas production is injected deep underground, far below groundwater or drinking water aquifers,” USGS explained. “In Oklahoma over 90 percent of the wastewater that is injected is a byproduct of oil extraction process and not waste frack fluid.”

In the Permian Basin of West Texas, a major U.S. location of production from shale fields, the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) in September 2021 reported six earthquakes since February 2020 registered at least a 3.5 magnitude on the Richter scale. The RRC identified the disposal of the large amounts of water used to break apart rock formations as a likely contributor to seismic activity.

The commission “asked drillers to cut back on the amount of wastewater they’re pumping underground,” according to World Oil. “It’s a fairly unusual move by the regulator, which hasn’t been as active as its counterpart in Oklahoma in trying to prevent earthquakes linked to fracking.”

Petroleum Industry Perspective

Petroleum industry trade groups have established websites to educate a skeptical public about geologic fracturing technologies — “fracking” wells. According to one, “There is no shortage of questions about domestic energy production — what technologies are used? What does it mean for our environment? How does it create jobs? What is hydraulic fracturing, anyway?”

Hydraulic fracturing has increased production on millions of oil and natural gas wells since 1949.

To address public concerns, Energy in Depth — using research from the industry’s long history of well fracturing — has noted: “While the first commercial fracturing job was conducted in the 1940s, the technique has been applied to the vast majority of U.S. oil and natural gas wells to enhance well performance, minimize drilling, and recover otherwise inaccessible resources.”

The Energy In Depth website, a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), has reported that 90 percent of operating U.S. wells have been fractured, “and the process continues to be applied to boost production in unconventional formations — such as tight gas sands and shale deposits.”

For another perspective about downhole explosives to increase production, see Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking.”

Roberts at Battle of Fredericksburg

Some Civil War historians might know of Col. Edward A. L. Roberts leading one of the many ill-fated Union charges up Marye’s Heights. Below is American Oil & Gas Historical Society research documenting little-known details from his service records at the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Oil well “shooting” or “fracking” torpedo inventor Col. Edward A.L. Roberts (1829-1881) was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery at Titusville, Pennsylvania. A simple headstone includes only his name and the military rank he held at the Battle of Fredericksburg 19 years earlier.

An 1888 lithograph depicts the Army of the Potomac crossing the Rappahannock under fire in December 1862. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

For four months during the Civil War, the man who would someday revolutionize oil and natural gas production technology served as Lt. Colonel with the 28th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He fought at Fredericksburg in December 1862 – while awaiting results from his court martial, which had convened just weeks earlier.

As the military court deliberated specifications of “intoxication on dress parade,” Col. Roberts’ regiment marched into battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia. On December 13, the 28th New Jersey was the center of Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s first doomed assault on the fiercely defended Marye’s Heights. Fourteen more failed assaults would follow.

Col. Edward Roberts is buried in Titusville, Pa., where the U.S. oil industry began in 1859.

The 28th charged into carefully positioned cannons. Confederate Col. Edward Porter Alexander had declared: “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”

Alexander was right. No Union soldiers would reach Marye’s Heights that day. Union casualties exceeded 12,000. When his commander was shot in the face during the 28th’s charge, Col. Roberts assumed command. One Union officer wrote, “We went into action under a most galling and deadly fire of shot and shell, and continued in action until near dark. Officers and men conducted themselves well.”

A month later, Col. Roberts’ court martial verdict was published under General Order No. 2. Despite his heroic actions during the battle, among the Civil War’s bloodiest, he was found guilty and ordered to be cashiered, effective January 12, 1863.

Prior to the court’s verdict, Col. Roberts had attempted to resign, but a superior officer characterized this as “tendering resignation in face of enemy.” Col. Roberts’ service as a Union officer ended in 1863. He soon would be transforming the Pennsylvania oilfields — and America’s petroleum industry.

Moonlighters shoot Wells

Andrew Dalrymple secretly shot his last well on February 5, 1873, when he and his wife were killed in a nitroglycerin explosion at Dennis Run, Pennsylvania. He allegedly had been “moonlighting” — illegal oil well shooting — in the Tidioute oilfield.

A Pennsylvania historical marker notes the 1865 demonstration of Col. E.A.L. Roberts’ invention.

Nitroglycerine was a powerful but dangerous means of fracturing oil-producing rock formations. The technology had been patented, its use rigorously protected. Pouring nitroglycerin was risky enough in the late 19th century. Doing it illegally at night made it more so.

“The Dalrymple torpedo accident at Tidioute brings to light the fact that nitroglycerine, or other dangerous explosives, are used, stored and manipulated secretly in places little suspected by the general public,” reported the Titusville Morning Herald.

“A large amount of this dangerous material has lately been stolen from the various magazines throughout the country, ” the newspaper added. “This species of theft is winked at by some parties, who are opposed to the Roberts torpedo patent.”

_______________________

Recommended Reading: The Green and the Black: The Complete Story of the Shale Revolution, the Fight over Fracking, and the Future of Energy (2016); The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World (2015); The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters  (2014); The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support this energy education website, subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information – Article Title: “Shooters – A “Fracking” History.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/hydraulic-fracturing. Last Updated: March 11, 2026. Original Published Date: September 1, 2007.

The post Shooters – A “Fracking” History appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

As petroleum exploration wells reached deeper by the early 1900s, highly pressurized natural gas formations in Kansas and the Indian Territory challenged well-control technologies of the day.

Ignited by a lightning bolt in the winter of 1906, a natural gas well at Caney, Kansas, towered 150 feet high and at night could be seen for 35 miles. The conflagration made headlines nationwide, attracting many exploration and production companies to Mid-Continent oilfields even as well control technologies tried to catch up.

A postcard of the Caney, Kansas, highly pressurized natural gas well struck by lightning on February 23, 1906.

Newspapers as far away as Los Angeles regularly updated readers as the technologies of the day struggled to put out the Caney well fire, “which defied the ingenuity of man to subdue its roaring flames.”

The Denver publisher Williamson Haffner Company printed and sold postcards with the caption: “Largest Gas Well in the World — 70,000,000 cubic feet — Struck by Lightning Feb. 23, 1906 — Caney, Kas.” The reverse side of one postcard sent to Attica, Indiana, on October 24, 1907, noted: “We came down here today in a carriage, 25 miles, going back in the morning. From your Mother.”

With effective oilfield firefighting technologies still evolving, it would take five weeks to bring the Kansas town’s wild well under control. It took several attempts to smother the column of fire using specially fabricated steel hoods.

Oil and Natural Gas Discoveries

By the early 1900s, abundant natural gas supplies were attracting manufacturing industries to the Midwest. Major gas fields had been discovered between Caney and Bartlesville in Indian Territory (the state of Oklahoma in 1907). About 20 miles apart, the towns were connected by the Caney River.

Caney had been founded in 1869 as a trading post. Osage Indians frequently camped along the Little Caney River before being moved to present-day Osage County, Oklahoma.

Oilfield workers struggled to cap the blazing well using cranes and specially fabricated steel hoods. Photo courtesy Jeff Spencer.

“Chief Black Dog of the Osage tribe blazed a trail ’30 horses wide’ along the Kansas-Indian Territory border and set a camp of the Osage tribe in the Caney vicinity,” reported the City of Caney. The region’s petroleum industry came to life thanks to the man who helped found Bartlesville.

In 1875, Jacob Bartles operated a trading post on the Caney River in the Cherokee Nation. He employed two ambitious young men, George Keeler and William Johnstone. They later started their own general store on the other side of the river. In 1897 — a decade before Oklahoma statehood — the two men drilled a well at a river bend near their store.

The Nellie Johnstone No. 1 well, today surrounded by Bartlesville’s Discovery One Park, was the first Oklahoma oil well.  Several very large natural gas well completions were made during the early 1900s between Caney, Kansas, and Bartlesville, Indian Territory, according to oil patch historian and petroleum geologist Jeff Spencer of Bellville, Texas. 

Kansas Boom Town

Oil wells completed near Caney by 1903 resulted in oil tank farms, oil pumping stations, and refineries being built in the area. Caney soon added several brick and glass plants fueled by natural gas.

“Glass manufacturing arrived in southeastern Kansas to take advantage of the large gas supplies,” Spencer noted in a 2007 article for the Petroleum History Institute (PHI) journal Oil-Industry History. Between 1902 and 1906, three glass factories opened near Caney.

However, the risks of highly pressurized gas formations became evident on February 23, 1906, when lightning struck the New York Oil and Gas Company’s derrick four miles outside Caney.

An undated postcard of an early oil well near Caney, Kansas, after it has been “shot” with nitroglycerin. Photo courtesy Jeff Spencer.

The well had reached about 1,430 feet deep after three weeks of drilling. Estimates of the well’s gas flow at the time of the lightning strike were over 30 million cubic feet of gas a day. By the time the fire was extinguished, the flow had reached as high as 70 million cubic feet of gas a day.

“Residents of Caney could read their newspapers at night by the glow of the burning gas well and even though it was early March, trees and flowers bloomed near the well site,” noted Spencer. “Nearby towns of Independence, Coffeyville, Bartlesville, and Caney all claimed the attraction,” he reported. “Excursion trains brought thousands of tourists to the site.”

Iron Hoods

Citing a 1907 article discovered in The Wide World Magazine, Spencer described efforts to extinguish the blazing well, quoting author W.H. Cotton: “Appliances hitherto generally used in such emergencies were useless; some new schemes must be devised to cope with the situation.”

A specially welded iron hood was made to smother the flaming well using a crane to lower the heavy, unwieldy device. Several unsuccessful attempts were made with this first hood. A second hood was then constructed and lowered over the flame. It too failed, as did several attempts with a third.

“A fourth hood had been built and delivered, but it was cumbersome, owing to its excessive weight,” Spencer explained in the PHI article. A larger crane would be needed. Hundreds had watched these experiments of oilfield well control technology. 

Success finally came after retrying the third hood. “All was breathless silence. Cameras were previously focused, and every possible preparation made to witness the event so looked for,” W.H. Cotton reported. The third hood was seated correctly over the well, extinguishing the fire.

Meanwhile, an article in the Chanute Tribune reported speculation that Caney’s well fire had been permitted to burn as a publicity stunt to promote the town’s natural gas reserves.

Cahege Oil & Gas Company

More petroleum companies explored around Caney. As would happen many times in the industry’s competitive boom-and-bust cycles, few would prosper. Many more would not survive.

Petroleum royalties and taxes brought wealth to Caney in southeastern Kansas, and helped build the McKinley School, pictured here, circa 1909.

Some historians have noted that a young Harry F. Sinclair drilled his first oil well at Caney in 1905, before making his fortune at the Glenn Pool oilfield near Tulsa a few years later (see Making Tulsa the Oil Capital).

Among the quickly organized exploration ventures seeking riches at Caney, the Cahege Oil & Gas Company of Carrollton, Missouri, in 1904 leased 15,000 acres. Local newspaper business editors endorsed the company’s exploration effort, proclaiming, “We believe the stock-holders have a good thing ahead.”

However, the two wells drilled by Cahege Oil & Gas Company did not produce commercial quantities, and the company failed, going broke the year before Carney’s headline and postcard-making gas well fire.

Another small Kansas town prospered far more than Caney, thanks to petroleum. On October 6, 1915, the Stapleton No. 1 oil well in El Dorado utilized the increasingly important science of geology to reveal a massive Mid-Continent oilfield. The El Dorado discovery led to another Kansas oil boom.

_______________________

Recommended Reading: Caney, Kansas: The Big Gas City (1985); The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021); The Natural Gas Revolution: At the Pivot of the World’s Energy Future (2013). Your Amazon purchases benefit the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Kansas Gas Well Fire.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/kansas-gas-well-fire. Last Updated: February 17, 2026. Original Published Date: October 24, 2016.

The post Kansas Gas Well Fire appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

Erle P. Halliburton in March 1921 received a U.S. patent for his improved method for cementing oil wells, helping to bring greater production and environmental safety to America’s burgeoning oilfields.

When Halliburton patented his “Method and Means for Cementing Oil Wells,” the 29-year-old inventor changed how oil and natural gas wells were completed. His contribution to oilfield production technology was just beginning.

George Halliburton, one of Erle P. Halliburton’s younger brothers, posed in a Ford Model T around 1929. “George, my grandfather, and several of E.P.’s brothers were employed with the company for many years,” explained Halliburton Operating Company President Cole Halliburton in 2020. A Halliburton self-propelled truck with cementing pumps can be seen in the background. Photo courtesy Timothy Johnson.

Halliburton was 27 years old in 1919 when he founded his oilfield equipment and service company headquartered in Duncan, Oklahoma. His New Method Oil Well Cementing Company would receive many patents on its way to becoming today’s Halliburton. 

Halliburton moved to Duncan and its nearby Healdton oilfield after working in the booming fields of Burkburnett, Texas. Halliburton patented the two-plug oil well cementing system in 1921 and later received 38 more U.S. patents for his oilfield innovations. 

“It is well known to those skilled in the art of oil well drilling that one of the greatest obstacles to successful development of oil-bearing sands has been the encountering of liquid mud water and the like during and after the process of drilling the wells,” Halliburton noted in his June 1920 patent application.

Erle Halliburton’s cementing process isolated downhole production zones, prevented collapse of the casing, and helped secure well integrity.

Halliburton’s patent awarded on March 1, 1921, explained that a typical well’s production, hampered by water intrusion that required time and expense for pumping out, “has caused the abandonment of many wells which would have developed a profitable output.”

Halliburton’s “method and means” included a “jet mixer” and the “measuring line,” a tool used to guarantee cementing accuracy. The improved well-cementing process isolated the various downhole zones, guarded against collapse of the casing, and allowed better control of the well throughout its producing life. Learn more about well production history in All Pumped Up – Oilfield Technology.

The city of Duncan, Oklahoma, dedicated an Erle P. Halliburton statue in 1993.

Inventing a Cement Service Company

After World War I, as Halliburton struggled to set up cementing operations in Texas, many oil companies were skeptical of cementing casing, according to the former editor-in-chief of E&P magazine.

“Most wells were doing well, they reasoned, without the new-fangled technology and there was, in the back of their minds, the question of possible well damage resulting from cementing,” Bill Pike explained in his 2007 article.

“For Halliburton, it was to be an uphill struggle to normalize the practice of cementing a well,” Pike added. Halliburton would persist — and patent much of today’s cementing technologies, including the jet mixer, the re-mixer and the float collar, the guide shoe and plug system, bulk cementing, multiple-stage cementing, advanced pump technology, and offshore cementing.

In the 1930s, Halliburton Company completed its first offshore cementing job using a barge-mounted cementing unit at a rig in the Creole Field, Gulf of Mexico,” according to a company history. “This was the start of what became the world’s most extensive offshore service.”

“It is safe to say that in the first half of the 20th century, the formative years, Halliburton dominated the development of cementing technology,” Pike proclaimed in Cementing is not for Sissies, where he also notes:

One of the earliest self-propelled Halliburton cementing trucks. It includes his patented “jet mixer” at the rear of the truck. Halliburton started his first oilfield service business in Duncan, Oklahoma, with a wagon, a team of mules, and a pump. Halliburton photo courtesy E&P magazine.

“Halliburton was ever the tinkerer. He owned nearly 50 patents. Most are oilfield and specifically cementing related, but the number includes patents for an airplane control, an opposed piston pump, a respirator, an airplane tire, and a metallic suitcase.”

For years Halliburton’s only real competitor in the oilfield service industry was R.C. (Carl) Baker of Coalinga, California. Baker Oil Tools also held around 50 patents, including a gas trap for oil wells in 1908, a pump-plunger in 1914, and a shoe guide for well casings in 1920.

Almost three decades after his “Method and Means for Cementing Oil Wells” patent, Halliburton would develop yet another industry-changing oilfield technology.

On March 17, 1949, in Oklahoma, Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company and Stanolind Oil Company completed a well near Halliburton’s headquarters in Duncan. It was the first commercial application of hydraulic fracturing, a process that dramatically increased oil and natural gas production.

The petroleum industry had been blasting wells with explosives to increase oil production for almost a century (see Shooters — a “Fracking” History).

Casing an Oil and Gas Well

Today, cement is first used soon after a well has been spudded — the beginning of drilling operations. The surface hole is lined with steel casing and cement to protect freshwater aquifers. Edwin L. Drake, who in 1859 drilled the first U.S. oil well next to a creek, invented a “drive pipe.”

Steel casing is installed in the surface hole to prevent the contamination of freshwater zones. (A) The conductor pipe has been cemented into place. Cement is pumped down the inside of the casing. (B) The cement in the bottom of the casing has been drilled out so that drilling can be resumed. Illustration courtesy the Kansas Geological Survey.

According to the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) “Petroleum: a primer for Kansas” in 2001, the surface hole may be several hundred or several thousand feet deep. When the predetermined depth is reached, drilling pauses so steel casing can be inserted.

To strengthen the well and protect the environment, cement is then pumped down the surface casing to fill the space between the outside of the casing and the wellbore all the way to the surface. This ensures the protection of freshwater aquifers and the security of the surface casing.

A 1939 issue of “The Cementer,” a Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company magazine.

KGS notes that the casing and the cement typically would be tested under pressure for 12 hours before drilling operations resume. A vital piece of equipment for controlling pressure — the blowout preventer – will be attached at the top of the surface casing.

Cementing a Well

When drilling has reached total depth and after well-logging and other tests have been completed and analyzed, petroleum company executives must decide whether to complete the well as a producing well — or plug it as a dry hole.

The KGS explains that if the well is to be plugged and abandoned as a dry hole, the wellbore is filled with a drilling fluid with additives that prevent its movement from the bore into the surrounding rock.

Several cement plugs can be used within the wellbore at intervals where porosity has been detected, KGS adds. This isolates the porosity zones — and prevents movement of fluids from one formation to another.

(A) The casing shoe makes it easier to insert the casing into the borehole. The float collar prevents drilling fluid from entering the casing. The bottom plug precedes the cement down the casing, and the top plug follows the cement. (B) The production casing can be perforated. Kansas Geological Survey illustration.

If a decision is made to complete the well as a producer, more casing is delivered to the site and the cementing company is called.

“The wellbore is filled with drilling fluid that contains additives to prevent corrosion of the casing and to prevent the movement of the fluid from the wellbore into the surrounding rock,” according to KGS.

Casing can be inserted to the hole’s total depth or a cement plug set at a specific depth. The cement is then pumped down the casing and displaced out of the bottom with drilling fluid. The cement then flows up and around the casing, filling the space between the casing and the borehole.

Special tools are sometimes used with the casing to allow the setting of cement between the outside of the casing and the wellbore at specific intervals. This is done to protect the casing and to prevent the movement of formation fluids from one formation to another.

“After the cementing of the casing has been completed, the drilling rig, equipment, and materials are removed from the drill site,” says KGS. “A smaller rig, known as a workover rig or completion rig, is moved over the wellbore. The smaller rig is used for the remaining completion operations.”

Experts from a well-perforating company are then called to the well to perforate holes in the casing at the proper position to allow the oil and natural gas to enter the casing (see Downhole Bazooka).

In addition to receiving 38 patents for petroleum-related tools, Halliburton patented several unrelated inventions, including sturdy aluminum luggage, which became Zero Halliburton. Learn more about the oilfield service company founder in Halliburton and the Healdton Oilfield.

_______________________

Recommended Reading: Erle P. Halliburton, Genius with Cement (1959); Oil in Oklahoma (1976); Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975); History of Oil Well Drilling (2007); Groundbreakers: The Story of Oilfield Technology and the People Who Made it Happen (2015). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Halliburton cements Wells” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/cementing-oil-wells. Last Updated: February 17, 2026. Original Published Date: March 19, 2013.

The post Halliburton cements Wells appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

In a remote northwestern Pennsylvania valley on August 27, 1859, Edwin L. Drake completed America’s first commercial oil well — launching the U.S. petroleum industry. Drake borrowed a common kitchen hand pump to retrieve the important new resource from a depth of 69.5 feet.

Seeking oil for the Seneca Oil Company for refining into a popular lamp fuel, kerosene, Drake’s shallow well created a new exploration and production industry; it wasn’t long before necessity and ingenuity combined to find something more efficient for producing oil from a well.

Invented in 1925 in Lufkin, Texas, the counterbalanced pumping unit brought greater efficiency to the oil patch. Photo by Bruce Wells.

As the nation’s new petroleum industry evolved, exploration and production pioneers realized improving oil well pump efficiency could greatly extend the economic life of far deeper wells.

By the time of the headline-making 1901 gusher at Spindletop Hill in Texas, pumping technology innovations were underway that would lead to the modern “nodding donkey.” These ubiquitous pumping units can be found at thousands of marginally producing oil wells reaching into both shallow and deep geologic formations. 

Stripper Wells

Oil wells will run dry, but advances in “artificial lift systems” technology have helped put off the inevitable. Even with 21st-century technologies, more than half of a producing formation’s oil can remain trapped underground.

Low-volume marginal or “stripper” wells produce less than 15 barrels a day, but the typical well produces less than three barrels per day. A marginal natural gas well does not exceed production of 90 thousand cubic feet of gas per day.

According to the National Stripper Well Association (NSWA), in 2020 there were an estimated 760,000 stripper wells in production, about 400,000 oil and 360,000 natural gas wells, and “that means, of one million active oil and natural gas wells in the United States, 76 percent are low production wells.”

For most marginal wells, once shut down, they are lost forever.

Efficiently — and safely — producing oil and natural gas has long been a challenge for geologists and engineers. As wells have reached deeper, they have required new technologies combined with hard work in the field.

America’s oilfield technologies advanced in the 1870s with patents like this “Improvement In Means For Pumping Wells,” invented in Pennsylvania.

“This is an occupation where most of your work is done in all types of weather while working alone, with few thanks, and possibly only a small herd of cattle as company,” noted Leslie Langston in the Oklahoma Marginal Well Commission’s The Lease Pumper’s Handbook in 2003.

It was the same in the industry’s earliest oil well pump days.

Central Power Units

Marginal quantities of oil always need help leaving the well. In the early days of the industry, oilmen adapted water-well technology to the problem and used steam-driven walking beam pump systems.

At each well, a steam engine rhythmically raised and lowered one end of a sturdy wooden beam, which pivoted on a Samson post. The walking beam’s other end cranked a long string of sucker rods up and down to pump oil to the surface.

An oilfield “jack plant” often included a single-cylinder horizontal engine that rotated eccentric wheels. Details of a centralized plant built in 1909 by the South Penn Oil Company that operated in Warren County, Pennsylvania, until the 1960s. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

The beam walked, and the oil surfaced, but a more efficient system was needed. One of the early oil pumping innovations came from an 1875 patent. An “Improvement in Means for Pumping Wells” allowed pumping of multiple wells with a single steam engine. The technology helped boost efficiency in the early oilfields of Venango County, Pennsylvania.

The new pumping method applied a system of linked and balanced walking beams to pump the oil wells. Wooden or iron rods instead of a rope and pulley system made the technology the forerunner of better production methods.

Learn more in Eccentric Wheels and Jerk Lines.

Walter Trout’s Revolutionary Prototype

As efficient as central power units were, time and technology changed the oilfield again. A new icon of U.S. petroleum production appeared and was soon known by many names: donkey, grasshopper, horsehead, thirsty bird, and pumpjack, among others.

Walter Trout sketched his design for a counterbalanced oil pump in 1925. It was in operation by the end of the year.

As East Texas timber supplies dwindled and the sawmill business declined, the long-established Lufkin Foundry & Machine Company discovered new opportunities in the oilfield. As more oil discoveries arrived, the company  — in Lufkin, Texas — not only survived but prospered.

Walter Trout was working in Texas for Lufkin Foundry & Machine in 1925 when he sketched out his idea for the now familiar counterbalanced oil well pumpjack. Before the end of the year, the Trout prototype was installed and pumping oil at a well near Hull, Texas, in a Humble Oil Company oilfield.

The founding of Lufkin Foundry and Machine Company in 1902 led to an oilfield icon known by many names — nodding donkey, grasshopper, horsehead, thirsty bird, etc. Photo by Bruce Wells.

“The well was perfectly balanced, but even with this result, it was such a funny-looking, odd thing that it was subject to ridicule and criticism, and it took a long time, nearly a year, before we could convince many the idea was a good one,” Trout explained.

Key to pumping the oil (and often set to run on a timer), an engine turns gears that move a counterweight connected to the walking beam, which moves the sucker rod up and down to up draw oil.

Ninety-nine years later, oilfield pumping units look much like Walter Trout’s original.

Although Lufkin Industries and other manufacturers continued to make them to meet worldwide demand, General Electric, which acquired Lufkin Industries for $3.3 billion in 2013, closed the downtown Lufkin foundry in 2015.

In addition to pumpjacks, electric submersible pump (ESP) systems have also become a vital artificial lift method of pumping production fluids (learn ESP history in Inventing the Electric Submersible Pump).

Smart Pumping Technology

As with nearly every segment of the petroleum industry, artificial lift systems — including the venerable pumpjack — are also benefiting the “smart” technology.

“Computer-based technology is used to monitor and analyze pump systems in real time from miles away, quickly and with minimal human interference,” explained Paul Nelson of Houston-based Weatherford International Ltd. in a 2001 article for Oil and Gas Online.

“On pumpjacks that means constant monitoring of well production and the lift unit in order to optimize energy usage while maximizing the amount of oil recovered from reluctant zones,” Nelson added.

Smart well technology has become of particular importance to the United States, where a very large portion of oil is produced from thousands of small stripper wells producing less than 10 barrels a day.

Many stripper wells have reached such a depleted pressure state that once they are shut in, they can never be economically restarted. The majority of them must be kept alive by oil well pumpjacks.

The lighting of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Pumping Unit” in 1966 became an annual event at Lufkin, Texas. More than 1,000 lights were added to a fully operational, 45-foot-tall pumpjack. Photo courtesy the Lufkin Daily News.

“By improving pump efficiencies without adding significantly to operating costs, smart well technology stands to extend by years the economic life of many of these wells and, by extension, add millions of barrels of oil to U.S. reserves,” he concluded.

Reservoir Management

In October 1942, the East Texas Salt Water Disposal Company of Tyler drilled the first saltwater injection well in the 12-year-old East Texas oilfield. As early as 1929, the Federal Bureau of Mines had determined injecting recovered saltwater into formations could increase reservoir pressures and oil production of the “Black Giant” oilfield.

Saltwater injection wells improved oil production in the giant East Texas oilfield.

The Texas Railroad Commission established the saltwater disposal company as a public utility to operate in the oilfield. The company treated and re-injected about 1.5 billion barrels of saltwater in its first 13 years, prompting one commissioner to proclaim saltwater injection as the “greatest oil conservation project in history.”

Drilling Technologies

Edwin L. Drake (1819-1880) became the “father of the petroleum industry” when he drilled what most consider America’s first commercial oil well on August 27, 1859, near Titusville, Pennsylvania. He used a steam engine and cable-tool rig. 

Drake pioneered new drilling technologies, including using iron casing to isolate his wellbore from nearby Oil Creek. Within days of his discovery, a competitor used a simple “spring pole” to drill the petroleum industry’s first dry hole.

Drilling technologies, including rotary “fishtail” bits and the first dual-coned bits of Howard Hughes Sr., are described in Making Hole — Drilling Technology. Another drilling advance came in 1933 with the use of slant drilling — see Technology and the “Conroe Crater.“

_______________________

Recommended Reading:  Lufkin, from sawdust to oil: A history of Lufkin Industries, Inc. (1982); Modern oil-well pumping, An Oil and gas journal book (1962); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry (2009). Your Amazon purchases benefit the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “All Pumped Up – Oilfield Technology.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/oil-well-pump. Last Updated: February 16, 2026. Original Published Date: September 1, 2006.

The post All Pumped Up – Oilfield Technology appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

Reversing an earlier ban, voters in Long Beach, California, in February 1962 approved petroleum exploration in their harbor. They wanted to save a community that had become known as “America’s Sinking City.” Five major oil companies formed a company called THUMS and built four artificial islands to produce the oil.

California’s headline-making 1921 oil discovery at Signal Hill launched a drilling boom that transformed the quiet residential area. So many derricks sprouted it became known as “Porcupine Hill.”

Island Grissom, one of the four THUMS islands at Long Beach, California, was named after astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, who died in the 1967 Apollo fire. Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Energy.

With many homeowners aspiring to become drillers and oilfield speculators, much of Signal Hill’s land was sold and subdivided into real estate lots of a size described as “big enough to raise chickens.”

Derricks were so close to one cemetery that graves “generated royalty checks to next-of-kin when oil was drawn from beneath family plots,” noted one local historian. Neighboring Long Beach joined the drilling boom.

By 1923, oil production reached more than one-quarter million barrels of oil per day. When Long Beach instituted a per-barrel oil tax, Signal Hill residents voted to incorporate in 1924.

At the time, “the law of capture” for petroleum production ensured the formerly scenic landscape would be transformed. Competing exploration and production companies crowded around newly completed wells and chased any signs of oil to the Pacific Ocean.

The islands are among the most innovative oilfield designs in the world. Circa 1965 illustration courtesy Oxy Petroleum.

By the early 1930s, the massive Wilmington oilfield extended through Long Beach as reservoir management concerns remained in the future. Naturally produced California oil seeps had led to many discoveries south of the 1892 Los Angeles City field.

Onshore and offshore tax revenues generated by the production of more than one billion barrels of oil and one trillion cubic feet of natural gas helped underwrite much of the Los Angeles area’s economic growth. But not without consequences.

Long Beach: A Sinking City

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported, “Subsidence, the sinking of the ground surface, is typically caused by extracting fluids from the subsurface.”

Southern California’s oilfield production in 1923 reached more than one-quarter million barrels of oil per day from Signal Hill, seen in the distance. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Californians had a lot of experience dealing with groundwater-induced subsidence and the building damage it caused, but by 1951, Long Beach was sinking at the alarming rate of about two feet each year.

Earth scientists noted that between 1928 and 1965, the community sank almost 30 feet. A TIME magazine headline called the bustling port “America’s Sinking City.”

After decades of prospering from petroleum production, the city prohibited “offshore area” drilling to slow the subsidence as the community looked for a solution.

On February 27, 1962, Long Beach voters approved “controlled exploration and exploitation of the oil and gas reserves” underlying their harbor. The city’s charter had prohibited such drilling since a 1956 referendum. Advancements in oilfield technologies enabled Long Beach to stay afloat.

Directional drilling and water injection opened another 6,500 acres of the Wilmington field — and saved the sinking city.

THUMS: Texaco, Humble, Union, Mobil, and Shell

Five oil companies formed a Long Beach company called THUMS: Texaco (now Chevron), Humble (now ExxonMobil), Union Oil (now Chevron), Mobil (now ExxonMobil), and Shell Oil Company. They built four artificial islands at a cost of $22 million in 1965 (more than $200 million in 2024 dollars).

The islands — named in 1967 Grissom, White, Chaffee, and Freeman in honor of lost NASA astronauts — would include 42 acres for about 1,000 active wells producing 46,000 barrels of oil and 9 million cubic feet of natural gas a day.

The prospering but “sinking city” of Long Beach would solve its subsidence problem with four islands and advanced drilling and production technologies. Photo by Roger Coar, 1959, courtesy Long Beach Historical Society.

To counter subsidence, five 1,750-horsepower motors on White Island drive water injection pumps to offset extracted petroleum, sustain reservoir pressures, and extend oil recovery. The challenge was once described as “a massive Rubik’s Cube of oil pockets, fault blocks, fluid pressures, and piping systems.”

Meanwhile, all of this happens amidst the scenic boating and tourist waters in Long Beach Harbor.

The California Resources Corporation operates the offshore part on the islands of the Wilmington field, the fourth-largest U.S. oilfield, according to the Los Angeles Association of Professional Landmen, whose members toured the facilities in November 2017.

Producing in Plain Sight

“Most interestingly, the islands were designed to blend in with the surrounding coastal environment,” explained LAAPL Education Chair Blake W.E. Barton of Signal Hill Petroleum. “The drilling rigs and other above-ground equipment are camouflaged and soundproofed with faux skyscraper skins and waterfalls.”

Most people simply do not realize the islands are petroleum production facilities. From the shore, the man-made islands appear occupied by upscale condos and lush vegetation. Many of the creative disguises came courtesy of Joseph Linesch, a pioneering designer who helped landscape Disneyland.

The THUMs islands required exceptional designs, and “the people who were involved at the time were very creative visionaries,” said Frank Komin, executive vice president for southern operations of the California Resources Corporation (CRC), owner of the islands.

About 80 percent of the company’s properties would overlie the Wilmington oilfield, according to CRC, noting that from 2003 to 2018, CRC operations generated over $5.2 billion in revenues, taxes, and fees for the City of Long Beach and the state.

THUMS Island White, named for Edward White II, the first American to walk in space, who died in 1967 with astronauts “Gus” Grissom and Roger B. Chaffee. A fourth island was named for NASA test pilot Ted Freeman, a fellow astronaut who died in 1963. Photo courtesy UCLA Library Digital Collections.

“Even today, those islands are viewed as one of the most innovative oil field designs in the world,” CRC executive Komin declared in a 2015 Long Beach Business Journal article. “The islands have grown to become icons in which the City of Long Beach takes a great deal of pride.” 

The Journal explained that 640,000 tons of boulders, some as large as five tons, were mined and placed to build up the perimeters of the islands. “Concrete facades constructed for aesthetic purposes also divert industrial noise away from nearby residents,” the article added.  For more noise abatement, electricity has provided nearly all the power for the islands.

The THUMS aesthetic integration of 175-foot derricks and production structures has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “part Disney, part Jetsons, part Swiss Family Robinson.”

_______________________

Recommended Reading: An Ocean of Oil: A Century of Political Struggle over Petroleum Off the California Coast (1998); Black Gold in California: The Story of California Petroleum Industry (2016); Early California Oil: A Photographic History, 1865-1940 (1985). Your Amazon purchases benefit the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “THUMS – California’s Hidden Oil Islands.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/thums-california-hidden-oil-islands. Last Updated: February 12, 2026. Original Published Date: March 8, 2018.

The post THUMS – California’s Hidden Oil Islands appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

Petroleum drilling and production technologies, among the most advanced of any industry, evolved as exploratory wells drilled deeper into highly pressurized geologic formations. One idea began with a sketch on the sawdust floor of a Texas machine shop.

On January 12, 1926, James S. Abercrombie (1891-1975) and Harry S. Cameron (1872-1928) received their first patent for a hydraulic ram-type blowout preventer (BOP). Their invention would become a vital technology for ending dangerous oil and natural gas gushers — and saving lives.

“The object of our invention is to provide a device designed to be secured to the top of the casing while the drilling is being done and which will be adapted to be closed tightly about the drill stem when necessary,” they noted in their 1922 U.S. patent application, which was approved four years later.

James Abercrombie and Harry Cameron in 1926 were awarded a U.S. patent (No. 1,569,247) for their Cameron Iron Works manually operated ram-type BOP.

“In 1920, Abercrombie and Cameron formed Cameron Iron Works. There, the two developed Abercrombie’s idea for a “ram-type” blowout preventer that would use hydrostatic pistons (rams) to clamp the drill stem and create a seal against well pressure during a blowout,” notes the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which in 2022 inducted Abercrombie and Cameron.

Wells that erupted into gushers were dramatic but dangerous and wasteful. The ram-type blowout preventer brought a dramatic change. By the time of the 1956 movie “Giant,” where actor James Dean celebrated in a rain of oil, most gushers had ended.

Spindletop Hill

Well control technologies for America’s oilfields began soon after the first U.S. oil well of 1859, which produced from a depth of just 69.5 feet. There was little understanding of petroleum geology as drilling depths increased and brought unpredictable downhole pressures.

Perhaps the most famous high-pressure blowout occurred at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas. Shortly after 10 a.m. on January 10, 1901, a three-man crew was drilling when a six-inch stream of oil and natural gas erupted 100 feet into the air. It was the first U.S. well to produce 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

Production from the giant Texas oilfield would prove important for an increasingly gasoline-hungry nation — the first U.S. auto show had taken place in New York City less than two months earlier. 

The 1901 “Lucas Gusher” at Spindletop Hill, Texas, was the first U.S. well to produce 100,000 barrels of oil per day. The iconic photo by Frank Trost of Port Arthur includes Anthony Lucas standing at right.

A Beaumont newspaper described the discovery well drilled by Anthony F. Lucas (and long predicted by Pattillo Higgins of the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company) as an “Oil Geyser — Remarkable Phenomenon South of Beaumont — Gas Blows Pipe from Well and a Flow of Oil Equaled Nowhere Else on Earth.”

It took nine days and 500,000 barrels of oil before a shut-off valve for the well could be affixed to the casing to stop the powerful flow of oil and natural gas. The record-setting petroleum production came from a salt dome geologic formation, as Lucas knew Higgins had predicted.

News and images of the “Lucas Gusher” would circulate nationwide, attracting more investors and creating new exploration, production, and refining companies.

Learn more by visiting the Spindletop/Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont.

Inventing the BOP

Patent records abound with inventors’ efforts to find a solution to controlling the underground pressure encountered when drilling. It took a successful wildcatter’s ingenuity to finally devise a workable “blowout preventer.”

Awarded in 1926, the patent application for the design of the ram-type BOP was filed in April 1922.

James Abercrombie (1891–1975) of Huntsville, Texas, had personal experience with the dangers of uncontrollable blowouts, having narrowly escaped one himself:

“With a roar like a hundred express trains racing across the countryside, the well blew out, spewing oil in all directions,” noted one witness. “The derrick simply evaporated. Casings wilted like lettuce out of water, as heavy machinery writhed and twisted into grotesque shapes in the blazing inferno.”

Abercrombie started in the oilfields as a roustabout in 1908 working for the Goose Creek Production Company and by 1920 owned several rigs in south Texas. He met Harry Cameron (1872–1928) in the machine shops of the Cameron-Devant Company, where Abercrombie was a frequent customer. The two men soon became friends and business partners.

In 1920, Abercrombie and Cameron formed Cameron Iron Works to repair drilling rigs and sell supplies and parts to oilmen. They employed five men with two lathes, a drill press, and hand tools. They named the company Cameron because Abercrombie already had two companies with his name.

Abercrombie said of his friend, “Harry Cameron was a great machine-tool man. You could give him a piece of iron and he could make just about anything you wanted.”

Sketched in Sawdust

James Abercrombie came up with the idea for a “ram-type” blowout preventer — using rams (hydrostatic pistons) to close on the drill stem and form a seal against the well pressure. He sketched his idea on the sawdust floor of the Cameron Iron Works machine shop in Humble, Texas.

Independent producer James Abercrombie (right) and machinist Harry Cameron helped stop eruptions due to inadequate pressure control. Photo courtesy American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Abercrombie and Cameron worked out the details, fabricating simple, rugged parts at the shop. When installed on a wellhead, the rams could be closed off, allowing full control of pressure during drilling and production.

In April 1922, they filed their patent application for a Type MO BOP (manually operated blowout preventer that could withstand pressures of up to 3,000 psi). Subsequent improvements continued to increase the device’s capability, according to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers,

The design was summed up in words from the application, “Another object is to provide a blowout preventer of the kind described, which will be composed to a minimum number of parts of simple and rugged construction.” The application’s basic patent was granted on January 12, 1926, U.S. patent no. 1,569,247.

By December 1931, Abercrombie patented an improved blowout preventer (patent No. 1,834,922, reissued in 1933). That design set a new standard for safe drilling during the Oklahoma City oilfield boom and other dangerously pressurized fields (see World-Famous “Wild Mary Sudik”). 

Engineering Landmark

The blowout preventer saved lives and quickly became an industry standard. An original Abercrombie and Cameron blowout preventer was displayed in the Smithsonian Institution for many years before returning to Cooper Cameron headquarters in Houston, where it was displayed in the lobby. Cameron International was acquired by Schlumberger in 2016.  

Modern blowout preventers include not only ram-types using steel rams to seal the borehole as in Abercrombie’s patents, but also annular BOPs (Granville Knox — 1952) and spherical BOPs (Ado Vujasinovic — 1972) stacked for redundancy and capable of withstanding pressures of 20,000 pounds per square inch.

This onshore BOP configuration from Schlumberger is typical for a well drilled with a hole size greater than four inches in diameter.

The early contributions of pioneers like James Abercrombie, Harry Cameron, and others made the search safer, more productive, and more sensitive to the environment.

In 2003, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers recognized the Cameron Ram-Type Blowout Preventer as a “Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.”

Since the History and Heritage Program began in 1971, more than 235 landmarks have been designated as “historic mechanical engineering landmarks, heritage collections or heritage sites,” noted ASME during the July 2003 designation ceremony. “Each represents a progressive step in the evolution of mechanical engineering and its significance to society in general.”

Abercrombie, who died on January 7, 1975, received a total of 30 U.S. patents. His philanthropy, especially to Rice University and Texas Children’s Hospital, made Abercrombie one of Houston’s most respected citizens. 

_______________________

Recommended Reading: Drilling Technology in Nontechnical Language (2012); Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Ending Oil Gushers – BOP.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/end-of-gushers. Last Updated: January 10, 2026. Original Published Date: February 1, 2010.

The post Ending Oil Gushers – BOP appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

An “Improvement in Rock Drills” patent issued to a New Yorker after the Civil War included the basic elements of the modern petroleum industry’s rotary rig.

On January 2, 1866, Peter Sweeney of New York City was granted U.S. patent No. 51,902 for a drilling system with many new technologies. His rotary rig design, which improved upon an 1844 British patent by Robert Beart, applied the rotary drilling method’s “peculiar construction particularly adapted for boring deep wells.”

Peter Sweeney’s 1866 “Stone Drill” patent included a roller bit using a “rapid rotary motion” that would evolve into modern rotary drilling technologies.

Sweeney’s design provided for a roller bit with replaceable cutting wheels such that “by giving the head a rapid rotary motion the wheels cut into the ground or rock and a clean hole is produced.”

Deeper Drilling

In another Sweeny innovation, the “drill-rod” was hollow and connected with a hose through which “a current of steam or water can be introduced in such a manner that the discharge of the dirt and dust from the bottom of the hole is facilitated.”

Better than commonly used steam-powered cable-tool technology, which used a heavy rope to lift and drop iron chisel-like bits, Sweeney claimed his drilling apparatus could be used with great advantage for “making holes in hard rock in a horizontal, oblique, or vertical direction.”

Drilling operations could be continued without interruption, Sweeny explained in his patent application, “with the exception of the time required for adding new sections to the drill rod as the depth of the hole increases. The dirt is discharged during the operation of boring and a clean hole is obtained into which the tubing can be introduced without difficulty.”

A 1917 rotary rig in the Coalinga, California, oilfield, where R.C. “Carl”  Baker invented many advanced drilling technologies. Photo courtesy of the Joaquin Valley Geology Organization.

Foreseeing the offshore exploration industry, Sweeney’s patent concluded with a note that “the apparatus can also be used with advantage for submarine operations.”

With the U.S. oil industry’s rapid growth after the first commercial well in 1859, drilling contractors improved upon Sweeney’s 1866 innovations. Cable-tool methods also improved as wells got deeper.

In 1891, Andrew J. Ross patented (No. US459309A) a method “to provide simple and efficient means for rotating the well-tubing, to provide a removable drilling-bit adapted to be rotated by the said well-tubing, which bit when the well is bored may be removed.

Among later drilling advancements was a device fitted to the rig’s rotary table that clamped around the drill pipe and turned. As this “kelly bushing” rotated, the pipe rotated, and with it the bit downhole. The torque of the rotary table was transmitted to the drill stem.

Thirty-five years after Sweeney’s patent, rotary drilling revolutionized the petroleum industry after a 1901 oil discovery by Capt. Anthony Lucas at Spindletop Hill in Texas. Less than a decade later, Howard Hughes Sr. tested a rotary bit with twin-cones that could drill through hard rock, helping to find previously unreachable oil and natural gas reserves. 

_______________________

Recommended Reading:  History Of Oil Well Drilling (2007); The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991); The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society  (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Sweeney’s 1866 Rotary Rig.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/1866-patent-rotary-rig. Last Updated: December 27, 2025. Original Published Date: January 2, 2013.

The post Sweeney’s 1866 Rotary Rig appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

The Anadarko Basin, extending more than 50,000 square miles across west-central Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, includes some of the most prolific U.S. natural gas reserves — and a 1974 drilling record.

Beginning in the late 1950s, when technological advances allowed it, Anadarko Basin wells in Oklahoma began to be drilled more than two miles deep in search of natural gas. Dangerous, highly pressurized formations required state-of-the-art blowout preventers (see Ending Oil Gushers — BOP).

Parker Drilling Rig No. 114 — built in the 1960s to drill wells for nuclear testing — was placed on display in 1991 to welcome visitors to Elk City, Oklahoma. 2003 photo by Bruce Wells.

By the 1960s, a few companies began risking millions of dollars and pushing rotary rig drilling technology to reach beyond the 13,000-foot level in what geologists called “the deep gas play.”

Although many experts disagreed, Robert Hefner III believed immense natural gas reserves resided even deeper, three miles or more. Hefner and other independent producers formed GHK (Glover-Hefner-Kennedy) Company, Oklahoma City, to drill expensive, ultradeep wells in the Anadarko Basin.

At 181 feet (17 stories), Elk City’s Parker Drilling rig near Route 66 and Interstate 40 is among the world’s tallest. Photo courtesy Elk City Chamber of Commerce.

The first GHK deep well attempt began in 1967, and it took two years to reach what at the time was a record depth of 24,473 feet. The well found large natural gas reserves, according to historian Robert Dorman, “But because of price controls, the sale of the gas could not cover the high cost of drilling so deeply — $6.5 million, as opposed to a few hundred thousand dollars for a conventional well.”

The Federal Power Commission, which had regulated natural gas prices since 1954, struggled to create a system of wellhead price regulation that worked. Undeterred and “in hopes that the economic equation would change,” Hefner drilled another ultra-deep well.

In 1972, the Baden No. 1 well near Elk City, Oklahoma, set a new world-record depth of 30,050 feet. The steel pipe alone that went into the ultradeep well weighed more than 1.5 million pounds. Drilling at such great depths required new technologies — and very big rigs.

Drilling Six Miles Deep

“Hefner and his associates learned a good deal from the Baden well, which they proceeded to apply to their next, most renowned project: Bertha Rogers No. 1,” Dorman explained in his 2006 book, It Happened in Oklahoma. Drilled by the largest land rig in the world (Tulsa-based Loffland Brothers Rig 32), the Bertha Rogers well “pushed the technology envelope even further.”

Using a specially designed extra-wide pipe, GHK and partner Lone Star Producing Company began drilling in November 1972, averaging about 60 feet per day. Fourteen-inch-wide casing weighing more than 106 pounds per foot was cemented in the well at 14,198 feet. The well’s 1.5 million pounds of casing was the heaviest ever handled by any drilling rig in U.S. petroleum history.

A 1974 souvenir of the Bertha Rogers No. 1 well, which sought natural gas almost six miles deep in Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin.

On April 13, 1974, Bertha Rogers No. 1 reached a total depth of 31,441 feet — where it encountered liquid sulfur. Lone Star Producing Company later estimated bottom hole pressure and temperature of 24,850 pounds per square inch and 475 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. It took about eight hours for bottom hole cuttings to reach the surface six miles above.

“It was the deepest hole in the world until it was surpassed by a well in the Soviet Union several years later,” Dorman reported. “Even so, Bertha Rogers reigned as the deepest well in the United States for three decades, finally exceeded in 2004.”

Ultra Deep Dry Hole

Drilling strained the Bertha Rogers rig’s equipment to the limit — and the well had to be “fished” 16 months after drilling began (see Fishing in Petroleum Wells). Because of dangerous downhole conditions, including corrosive pockets of hydrogen sulfide, the historic well had to be completed at a shallower depth.

Elk City’s most noteworthy well eventually produced natural gas from about 13,000 feet (production ended in July 1997). But like its costly predecessors, “the Bertha Rogers as a business venture was a losing proposition,” Dorman reported. “It cost $7 million but yielded relatively little gas. Some observers classified it as an ultradeep dry hole.”

Meanwhile, Robert Hefner’s belief in the deep Anadarko Basin would prove true as drilling technologies improved. Drilling time in the 1990s fell as much as two-thirds, helping contain costs.

By 2002, Oklahoma’s deep wells would produce more than six trillion cubic feet of natural gas — with trillions more to be found. Two years later, natural gas passed oil as the most valuable energy commodity in Oklahoma.

Rig No. 114 and Atomic Wells

In western Oklahoma, another towering rig has a noteworthy oil patch history. With one of the tallest masts in the world, the 180-foot Parker Drilling Company Rig No. 114 has attracted Elk City tourists since 1991.

Parker Rig No. 114 was one of three designed for drilling deep wells to test atomic detonations.

Parker Drilling No. 114’s story began in 1969 when the Tulsa-based company signed a contract with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to drill a series of holes up to 120 inches in diameter and 6,500 feet in depth in Alaska and Nevada for experimental tests. The advanced drilling rig and two sister rigs were built to drill atomic wells.

Founded in 1934 by Gifford C. Parker, by the 1960s Parker Drilling had set numerous world records for deep and extended-reach drilling. The company developed and tested new deep-drilling technologies that would become industry standards.

With the Cold War at its height, the government sought Parker Drilling’s expertise for drilling wide-bore wells needed to test nuclear bombs. 

A separate government program used downhole nuclear devices in New Mexico and Colorado as part of a wider set of experiments. That nuclear well fracturing program, which included Project Gasbuggy for increasing petroleum production from shale, was established by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957. 

After its experimental nuclear well tests, Rig No. 114 drilled conventional wells to record-breaking depths. Erected next to the historic Casa Grande Hotel in 1991, it became an Elk City tourist attraction.

Project Plowshare experiments were part of a wider effort to explore peaceful, constructive uses of nuclear explosions (see Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking”).

Elk City Tourist Attraction

Recognizing a potential city landmark and tourist attraction, Elk City decided to preserve the Parking Drilling Company Rig No. 114. 

Since 1991, the 180-foot drilling rig — still one of the tallest in the world — has welcomed visitors traveling to Elk City via Route 66 or Interstate 40. It towers over the four-story Casa Grande Hotel building, constructed in 1928 — two years after Highway 66 was given its now historic number.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995, the Casa Grande Hotel in 2025 got “a little bit of a facelift after many years of inactivity,” according to the Tulsa-based Oklahoma Route 66 Association. New windows were installed at the long-shuttered hotel.

“More work is planned in future phases, such as creating a welcome center and renovating the commercial areas, including the spot that housed a geology and oil/gas museum in the 1990s,” the association noted.

Erecting the Parker rig at the historic hotel in 1991 proved challenging. With limited space in the lot, “the rig could not be laid out and assembled on the ground, then raised into position, as rigs are built in the oilfields,” reported the Oklahoman newspaper. “Instead, pieces were raised by crane and pinned by Parker employees who climbed the rig as it grew taller.”

Local independent oil and gas producer John West once used the historic hotel’s lobby to exhibit oilfield artifacts in the Anadarko Basin Museum of Natural History, but a lack of funding led to the museum being closed by 2005.

Oilfield art and drill bit models were among the exhibits in the former Anadarko Museum of Natural History inside the Casa Grande Hotel building. Photo by Bruce Wells.

Superman’s “World’s Deepest Oil Well”

The risk of drilling too deep highlighted the theatrical release of the first full-length Superman movie on November 23, 1951. “Superman and the Mole Men,” which earned good reviews, featured reporters Clark Kent (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) on assignment in the town of Silsby, “Home of the World’s Deepest Oil Well.”

The National Oil Company had been making news at its “Havenhurst Experimental Number One” drilling site — especially after the drill bit had “broken into clear air” at a depth of 32,742 feet. “Good heavens, that’s practically to the center of the earth!” Lois exclaimed (the deepest U.S. well in 1951 reached 20,521 feet).

Mole men emerged from a National Oil Company experimental well drilled more than six miles deep in the 1951 movie “Superman and the Mole Men.”

After finding organisms on the drilling equipment, oil company executives concluded there must be life, perhaps even a civilization, far below the surface. Alarmed, the company attempted to cap the well — but small humanoid creatures emerged from the borehole.

The townspeople feared a mole-men invasion. It would take the steady nerves and compassion of Superman to resolve the crisis. He calmed the mob, saved the mole men, and returned them to the safety of the well. In a spectacular conclusion, the derrick collapsed in flames, forever closing the connection between the two worlds.

In the real world, the “Kola Superdeep Borehole,” an experimental well drilled in the Soviet Union in 1989, reached a vertical depth of 40,230 feet, the current world record.

The 1974 Bertha Rogers No. 1 well drilled in Washita County, Oklahoma  — a 31,441-foot “dry hole” of the Anadarko Basin — remains the deepest well ever drilled in the United States.

_______________________

Recommended Reading: It Happened in Oklahoma (2019); The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021); Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century (2015); History Of Oil Well Drilling (2007); The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information – Article Title: “Anadarko Basin in Depth.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/anadarko-basin-depth. Last Updated: December 26, 2025. Original Published Date: July 24, 2014. 

The post Anadarko Basin in Depth appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

Early petroleum technologies included cannons for fighting oil tank storage fires, especially in the Great Plains, where lightning strikes ignited derricks, engine houses, and tanks. Shooting a cannonball into the base of a burning storage tank allowed oil to drain into a holding pit or ditch, putting out the fire.

“Oil fires, like battles, are fought by artillery,” proclaimed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in December 1884. Oilfield conflagrations challenged America’s petroleum industry since the first commercial well in 1859 (see First Oil Well Fire). An MIT student offered a recent, first-person account. 

Especially in Midwest oilfields, lightning strikes could ignite derricks, engine houses, and rows of storage tanks. Photo courtesy Butler County History Center & Kansas Oil Museum.

“Lightning had struck the derrick, followed pipe connections into a nearby tank and ignited natural gas, which rises from freshly produced oil. Immediately following this blinding flash, the black smoke began to roll out,” the writer noted in The Tech, a student newspaper established in 1881.

The MIT article, “A Thunder Storm in the Oil Country,” described what happened next:

“Without stopping to watch the burning tank-house and derrick, we followed the oil to see where it would go. By some mischance the mouth of the ravine had been blocked up and the stream turned abruptly and spread out over the alluvial plain,” reported the article.

Oilfield operators used muzzle-loading cannons to fire solid shot at the base of burning oil tanks, draining the oil into ditches to extinguish the blaze.

“Here, on a large smooth farm, were six iron storage tanks, about 80 feet in diameter and 25 feet high, each holding 30,000 barrels of oil,” it added, noting the burning oil “spread with fearful rapidity over the level surface” before reaching an oil storage tank.

“Suddenly, with a loud explosion, the heavy plank and iron cover of the tank were thrown into the air, and thick smoke rolled out,” the writer observed.

“Already the news of the fire had been telegraphed to the central office, and all its available men and teams in the neighborhood ordered to the scene,” he added. “The tanks, now heated on the outside as well as inside, foamed and bubbled like an enormous retort, every ejection only serving to increase the heat.”

Technological innovations in Oklahoma oilfields helped improve petroleum production worldwide. The oilfield artillery exhibit at the Oklahoma Oil Museum in Seminole educated visitors until the museum closed in 2019. Photo by Bruce Wells.

The area of the fire rapidly extended to two more tanks: “These tanks, surrounded by fire, in turn boiled and foamed, and the heat, even at a distance, was so intense that the workmen could not approach near enough to dig ditches between the remaining tanks and the fire.”

Noting the arrival of “the long looked for cannon,” the reporter noted, adding, “Since the great destruction is caused by the oil becoming overheated, foaming and being projected to a distance, it is usually desirable to let it out of the tank to burn on the ground in thin layers; so small cannons throwing a three-inch solid shot are kept at various stations throughout the region for this purpose.”

The wheeled cannon was placed in position and “aimed at points below the supposed level of the oil and fired,” explained the witness. “The marksmanship at first was not very good, and as many shots glanced off the iron plates as penetrated, but after a while nearly every report was followed by an outburst.”

 The oil in three storage tanks was slowly drawn down by this means, “and did not again foam over the top, and the supply to the river being thus cut off, the fire then soon died away.”

Mobil Oil in 1969 donated to Corsicana, Texas, a cannon that once stood at the Magnolia Petroleum tank farm “to shoot a hole in the bottom of the Cyprus tanks if lightning struck.”

In the end, “it was not till the sixth day from that on which we saw the first tank ignited that the columns of flame and smoke disappeared,” the 1884 MIT article concluded. “During this time 180,000 barrels of crude oil had been consumed, besides the six tanks, costing $10,000 each, destroyed.”

Postcards promoted a community’s petroleum prosperity with images of gushers and burning oil tanks. The Lima oilfield was discovered in 1885. Circa 1910 postcard published by Robbins Bros., Boston.

Visitors to Corsicana, Texas — where oil was discovered while drilling for water in 1894 (see First Texas Oil Boom) — can view an oilfield cannon donated to the city in 1969 by Mobil Oil. The marker notes: 

“Fires were a major concern of oil fields. This cannon stood at the Magnolia Petroleum tank farm in Corsicana. It was used to shoot a hole in the bottom of the Cyprus tanks if lightning struck. The oil would drain into a pit around the tank to be pumped away. The cannon was donated by Mobil Oil Company in 1969.”

Another cannon can be found on exhibit in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, near the first Oklahoma oil well, drilled a decade before 1907 statehood. Exhibits at Discovery One Park include an 84-foot cable-tool derrick first erected in 1948 and replaced in 2008.

Still more oilfield artillery also can be found at the Kansas Oil Museum in Butler County. Another educates tourists in Ohio. 

An oilfield cannon exhibit in Discovery One Park in Bartlesville, site of the first significant Oklahoma oilfield discovery of 1897. Photo by Bruce Wells.

The Wood County Historical Center and Museum in Bowling Green displays its “unusual fire extinguisher” among its petroleum-artifact collection. The Buckeye Pipeline Company of Norwood donated the cannon, according to the museum’s director, Kelli King.

“The cannon, cast in North Baltimore (Ohio), was used in the 1920s in Cygnet before being moved to Northwood,” Kelli reported in 2005, adding that more local history can be found in the museum’s documentary “Ohio Crude” and in its exhibit, “Wood County in Motion.”

Museums in nearby Hancock County and Allen County also have petroleum collections from the Buckeye State’s oilfields.  

Modern Oilfield Firefighting

When oilfield well control expert and firefighter Paul “Red” Adair died at age 89 in 2004, he left behind a famous “Hell Fighter” legacy. The son of a blacksmith, Adair was born in 1915 in Houston and served with a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit during World War II.

Adair began his career working for Myron M. Kinley, who patented a technology for using charges of high explosives to snuff out well fires. Kinley, whose father had been an oil well shooter in California in the early 1900s, also mentored Asger “Boots” Hansen and “Coots” Mathews of Boots & Coots International Well Control and other firefighters.

Famed oilfield firefighter Paul “Red” Adair of Houston, Texas, in 1964.

In 1959, Adair founded Red Adair Company in Houston and soon developed innovative techniques for “wild well” control. His company would put out more than 2,000 well fires and blowouts worldwide — onshore and offshore.

The Texas firefighter’s skills were tested in 1991 when Adair and his company extinguished 117 oil well fires set in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s retreating Iraqi army. Adair was joined by other pioneering well firefighting companies, including Cudd Well Control, founded by Bobby Joe Cudd in 1977.

Russian Anti-Tank Gun

Unable to control a 2020 oil well fire in Siberia, a Russian oil company called in the army. In May, a well operated by the Irkutsk Oil Company in Russia’s Irkutsk region ignited into a geyser of flame. When Irkutsk Oil Company firefighters were unable to extinguish the blaze, the Russian Defense Ministry flew a Rapira MT-12 anti-tank gun to the well site.

The Russian army’s 100-millimeter gun repeatedly fired at the flaming wellhead, “breaking it from the well and allowing crews to seal the well,” according to a June 8, 2020, article in Popular Mechanics.

In 1966, the Soviet Union used a nuclear device to extinguish a natural gas fire — as U.S. scientists experimented with nuclear fracturing of natural gas wells (see Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking”).

Learn more about the earliest oilfield fires and how the petroleum industry fought them with cannons, wind-making machines (including jet engines), and nuclear bombs in Oilfield Firefighting Technologies.

_______________________

Recommended Reading: Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975); The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry (2009). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Oilfield Artillery fights Fires.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/oilfield-artillery-fights-fires. Last Updated: December 11, 2025. Original Published Date: September 1, 2005.

The post Oilfield Artillery fights Fires appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

Project Gasbuggy was the first in a series of Atomic Energy Commission downhole nuclear detonations to release natural gas trapped in shale. This was “fracking” late 1960s style.

In December 1967, government scientists — exploring the peacetime use of controlled atomic explosions — detonated Gasbuggy, a 29-kiloton nuclear device they had lowered into an experimental well in rural New Mexico. The Hiroshima bomb of 1945 was about 15 kilotons.

Scientists prepare to lower a 13-foot by 18-inch diameter nuclear device into a New Mexico natural gas well in December 1967. The Project Gasbuggy 29-kiloton bomb will be detonated at a depth of 4,240 feet. Photo courtesy Los Alamos Lab.

The Project Gasbuggy team included experts from the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and El Paso Natural Gas Company. They sought a new, powerful method for fracturing petroleum-bearing formations.

Near three low-production natural gas wells, the team drilled to a depth of 4,240 feet — and lowered a 13-foot-long by 18-inch-wide nuclear device into the borehole.

Plowshare Program: Peaceful Nukes

The 1967 experimental explosion in New Mexico was part of a wider set of experiments known as Plowshare, a program established by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957 to explore the constructive use of nuclear explosive devices.

“The reasoning was that the relatively inexpensive energy available from nuclear explosions could prove useful for a wide variety of peaceful purposes,” noted a report later prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy.

From 1961 to 1973, researchers carried out dozens of separate experiments under the Plowshare program — setting off a total of 29 nuclear detonations. Most of the experiments focused on creating craters and canals. Among other goals, federal officials hoped the Panama Canal could be inexpensively widened.

“In the end, although less dramatic than nuclear excavation, the most promising use for nuclear explosions proved to be for stimulation of natural gas production,” explained the September 2011 government report.

Detonated 60 miles from Farmington in 1967, the first nuclear detonation created a “Rubble Filled Chimney,” producing 295 million cubic feet of natural gas — and deadly Tritium radiation.

Tests, mostly conducted in Nevada, also took place in the petroleum fields of New Mexico and Colorado. Project Gasbuggy was the first of three nuclear fracturing experiments that focused on stimulating natural gas production. Two later tests took place in Colorado.

Atomic Energy Commission scientists worked with experts from the Astral Oil Company of Houston, with engineering support from CER Geonuclear Corporation of Las Vegas. The experimental wells, which required custom drill bits to meet the hole diameter and narrow hole deviation requirements, were drilled by Denver-based Signal Drilling Company or its affiliate, Superior Drilling Company.

Projects Rulison and Rio Blanco

In 1969, Project Rulison, the second of the three nuclear well stimulation projects, blasted a natural gas well near Rulison, Colorado. Scientists detonated a 43-kiloton nuclear device almost 8,500 feet underground to produce commercially viable amounts of natural gas.

In 1973, another fracturing experiment at Rio Blanco, northwest of Rifle, Colorado, was designed to increase natural gas production from low-permeability sandstone.

Gasbuggy: “Site of the first United States underground nuclear experiment for the stimulation of low-productivity gas reservoirs.” Photo courtesy DOE.

The May 1973 Rio Blanco test consisted of the nearly simultaneous detonation of three 33-kiloton devices in a single well, according to the Office of Environmental Management. The explosions occurred at depths of 5,838, 6,230, and 6,689 feet below ground level. It would prove to be the last experiment of the Plowshare program.

Although a 50-kiloton nuclear explosion to fracture deep oil shale deposits — Project Bronco — was proposed, it never took place. Growing knowledge (and concern) about radioactivity ended these tests for the peaceful use of nuclear explosions. The Plowshare program was canceled in 1975.

Decades later, after an examination of all the nuclear test projects, the U.S. Department of Energy reported that by 1974, about 82 million dollars had been invested in the nuclear gas stimulation technology program (i.e., nuclear tests Gasbuggy, Rulison, and Rio Blanco).

The September 2011 DOE report estimated that even after 25 years of gas production of all the natural gas deemed recoverable, only 15 to 40 percent of the investment could be recovered. At the same time, alternative, non-nuclear technologies were being developed, such as hydrofracturing.

DOE concluded that consequently, under the pressure of economic and environmental concerns, the Plowshare Program was discontinued at the end of FY 1975.

Project Gasbuggy: Nuclear Fracking

“There was no mushroom cloud, but on December 10, 1967, a nuclear bomb exploded less than 60 miles from Farmington,” explained historian Wade Nelson in an article written three decades later, “Nuclear explosion shook Farmington.”

Government scientists believed a nuclear device would provide “a bigger bang for the buck than nitroglycerin” for fracturing dense shales and releasing natural gas. Illustration courtesy Los Alamos Lab.

The 4,042-foot-deep detonation created a molten glass-lined cavern about 160 feet in diameter and 333 feet tall. It collapsed within seconds. Subsequent measurements indicated fractures extended more than 200 feet in all directions — and significantly increased natural gas production.

A September 1967 Popular Mechanics article described how nuclear explosives could improve previous fracturing technologies, including gunpowder, dynamite, TNT — and fractures “made by forcing down liquids at high pressure.”

Hydraulic fracturing technologies pump a mixture of fluid and sand down a well at extremely high pressure to stimulate production of oil and natural gas wells. 

The first commercial application of hydraulic fracturing took place in March 1949 near Duncan, Oklahoma, following experiments in a Kansas natural gas field. Increasing oil production by fracturing geologic formations had begun about a century earlier (see Shooters – A “Fracking” History).

A 1967 illustration in Popular Mechanics magazine showed how a nuclear explosive would improve earlier technologies by creating bigger fractures and a “huge cavity that will serve as a reservoir for the natural gas.”

Scientists predicted that nuclear explosives would create more and bigger fractures “and hollow out a huge cavity that will serve as a reservoir for the natural gas” released from the fractures.

“Geologists had discovered years before that setting off explosives at the bottom of a well would shatter the surrounding rock and could stimulate the flow of oil and gas,” Nelson explained. “It was believed a nuclear device would simply provide a bigger bang for the buck than nitroglycerin, up to 3,500 quarts of which would be used in a single shot.”

The first 1967 underground detonation test was part of a broader federal program begun in the late 1950s to explore the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions.

“Today, all that remains at the site is a plaque warning against excavation and perhaps a trace of tritium in your milk,” Nelson added in his 1999 article. He quoted James Holcomb, the site foreman for El Paso Natural Gas, who saw a pair of white vans that delivered pieces of the disassembled nuclear bomb.

“They put the pieces inside this lead box, this big lead box…I (had) shot a lot of wells with nitroglycerin and I thought, ‘That’s not going to do anything,” reported Holcomb. A series of three production tests, each lasting 30 days, was completed during the first half of 1969. Government records indicated the Gasbuggy well produced 295 million cubic feet of natural gas.

“Nuclear Energy: Good Start for Gasbuggy,” proclaimed the December 22, 1967, TIME magazine. The Department of Energy, which had hoped for much higher production, determined that Tritium radiation contaminated the gas. It flared — burned off — the gas during production tests that lasted until 1973. Tritium is a naturally occurring radioactive form of hydrogen.

A 2012 Nuclear Regulatory Commission report noted, “Tritium emits a weak form of radiation, a low-energy beta particle similar to an electron. The tritium radiation does not travel very far in air and cannot penetrate the skin.”

A plaque marks the site of Project Gasbuggy in the Carson National Forest, 90 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

According to Nelson, radioactive contamination from the flaring “was minuscule compared to the fallout produced by atmospheric weapons tests in the early 1960s.” From the well site, Holcomb called the test a success. “The well produced more gas in the year after the shot than it had in all of the seven years prior,” he said.

In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency began monitoring groundwater and surface water near the Gasbuggy site. In 2008, the Energy Department’s Office of Legacy Management assumed responsibility for long-term surveillance and maintenance at the Gasbuggy site.

DOE took responsibility for the hydrological monitoring program, and began monitoring natural gas and water produced with natural gas wells near the site. With no Gasbuggy-related contaminants identified at the sampled gas wells by 2015, DOE discontinued the groundwater and surface water monitoring program.

A DOE marker placed at the Gasbuggy site in November 1978 reads:

Site of the first United States underground nuclear experiment for the stimulation of low-productivity gas reservoirs. A 29 kiloton nuclear explosive was detonated at a depth of 4227 feet below this surface location on December 10, 1967. No excavation, drilling, and/or removal of materials to a true vertical depth of 1500 feet is permitted within a radius of 100 feet of this surface location. Nor any similar excavation, drilling, and/or removal of subsurface materials between the true vertical depth of 1500 feet to 4500 feet is permitted within a 600 foot radius of T 29 n. R 4 w. New Mexico principal meridian, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico without U.S. Government permission.

USSR’s Project NEVA

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) responded with its own more extensive program in 1965, according to a declassified 1981 Central Intelligence Agency report.

The CIA assessment, “The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions,” reported that by the mid-1970s, the Soviets had detonated nine nuclear devices in seven Siberian fields to increase natural gas production as part of Project NEVA – Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy.

The USSR atomic tests delivered essentially the same conclusion as did America’s Project Gasbuggy – no commercially feasible petroleum production — and not popular with the public because of environmental concerns. The USSR abandoned Project NEVA experiments in 1989, more than a decade after the end of America’s Plowshare program.

Parker Drilling Rig No. 114

In 1969, Parker Drilling Company signed a contract with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to drill a series of holes up to 120 inches in diameter and 6,500 feet in depth in Alaska and Nevada for additional nuclear tests. Parker Drilling’s Rig No. 114 was one of three special rigs built to drill the wells.

Parker Drilling Rig No. 114 was among those used to drill wells for nuclear detonations and later modified to drill conventional, very deep wells. Since 1991, the 17-story rig has welcomed visitors to Elk City, Oklahoma, next to the shuttered Anadarko Museum of Natural History. Photo by Bruce Wells.

Founded in Tulsa in 1934 by Gifford C. Parker, by the 1960s Parker Drilling had set numerous world records for deep and extended-reach drilling.

According to the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, the company “created its own niche by developing new deep-drilling technology that has since become the industry standard.”

Following completion of the nuclear-test wells, Parker Drilling modified Rig No. 114 and its two sister rigs to drill conventional wells at record-breaking depths.

After retiring Rig No. 114 from oilfields, Parker Drilling in 1991 loaned it to Elk City, Oklahoma, as an energy education exhibit next to the Anadarko Museum of Natural History, which later closed. The 17-story rig has remained there to welcome Route 66 and I-40 travelers.

Learn about drilling miles deep in Anadarko Basin in Depth.

_______________________

Recommended Reading:  Atoms for Peace and War 1953-1961 (2017); Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War America (2012). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.

_______________________

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking”.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/project-gasbuggy. Last Updated: December 7, 2025. Original Published Date: December 10, 2013.

The post Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking” appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.