Drake, together with George Bissel, a New York lawyer who will be introduced below, became the founders of the modern oil industry. In other words, it was not only the first commercial oil well it was also the largest producer at that time ever. The well is said to have produced up to 20 barrels a day using a hand pump, more than any other well had produced at the time. The well was as such no drilling hazard even, though, for obvious reasons, it lacked a blow-out preventer. The reservoir was normally pressured, which was why they could drill into the reservoir without any fluids flowing into the hole and causing a blowout. Unlike many other spectacular discoveries, such as Spindletop in 1901 ( GEO ExPro 03/2008), the Drake Well was no gusher. The wildcat had turned into a discovery.ĭrake arrived on the scene the following morning and found Smith guarding the well that was now flowing at a snail’s pace of about 10 barrels a day. A dark-coloured fluid was floating on top of the water within a few feet of the drill-floor. Smith, originally a blacksmith, who had spent much of his life drilling salt wells, visited the well and looked into the pipe. The next day, the experienced driller, William A. “They had absolutely no idea that they had struck oil that late afternoon,” says Zolli. So they put away their tools and went home for the weekend, totally unaware that they were about to change the course of history. Nowadays, a drilling break would have alerted the crew, but the driller had, as can be easily understood, absolutely no experience in drilling into an oil reservoir. It was caused by the drillbit entering the porous sandstone reservoir that later proved to contain oil. Using drilling jargon, this much quoted historical account can be translated as a “drilling break”, a sudden increase in the rate of penetration. 1 m) a day on the average, the drill “dropped into a crevice and slipped down another six inches (15cm)”. On the afternoon of Saturday, August 27, after having drilled to 69.5 ft (21.2 m) below the ground, at 3 ft (ca. The Drake Well was spudded in the middle of August 1859 following a one year ordeal trying to get hold of a reliable driller and securing the necessary funds that were quickly running out. More important for the Drake Well, a number of salt and fresh water wells in the western Appalachian had encountered small quantities of liquid petroleum during the previous decades.ĭrake # 1 was thus a true wildcat, without a specific target, and without any kind of geological reasoning- simple surface observations were used to find the well location. Owen (AAPG Memoir 6, 1975), “it seems reasonable to credit priority to the phenomenal Baku field for the world’s first drilled oil well”. The reason for being a little cautious is that wells both finding and producing oil had been drilled in many other places around the world, long before the Drake # 1 well, and according to E.W. Zolli, director of the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania, has no desire to take part in a competition over which is the world’s first oil well, which explains why she prefers phrasing it like this. As such, it launched the modern oil industry in 1859.”īarbara T. “The Drake Well was the first commercial well drilled for the purpose of finding oil.
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