Old Spindletop …

Before 1900 all wells, water or oil, were drilled by “cable tool” drills.  These machines had what was essentially a very heavy bar (with a bit on the end) that was habitually raised and dropped in the hole in order to advance it.  These drills clanged and banged a lot and were affectionately known as “stompers” or churn drills.  The driller would drill a few feet and then would run a “bailer” down the hole to suck out the sand and broken rock to clean it.  These rigs worked pretty well in rock and other consolidated material where the hole was competent enough to stand open on its own, but collapsing formations like sand or clay could only be held open by driving in a string of pipe.  Sometimes this worked quite well, but in difficult formations where the sand or clay alternated with rock, several strings of pipe, each smaller than the last, would have to be run into the hole to get to a desired depth.  It was tedious work and the necessity of multiple stings of pipe often limited the ultimate depth.

In Beaumont Texas, in 1900, the cable tool method failed.  The drillers couldn’t get through the sand.  Eventually they hired some water well drillers from South Dakota who had been using a different method of drilling, the rotary method, to do the work.  This type of drilling consisted of turning a hollow piece of pipe with a bit on the end through which water was pumped.  The hole was kept open because it was filled with the fluid being pumped down the stem.  The circulating water had the added advantage of washing the cuttings out of the hole.  Even then the drillers had trouble keeping the hole open and could see the need for something thicker than water to hold it open.  At Beaumont, in 1900, one of them saw a herd of cows watering at a pond just below the rig and got an idea.  When the light went on, he and his co-workers cowboyed the cows back and forth through the pond until it was a gooey mud which they then used for the drilling fluid.  The rest is history … the drill went to work, beautifully, and at 1139 feet they hit oil.  Their method was proved and the method that they invented is still, in essence, what is used to drill oil wells today, 110 years hence.  The well they drilled, Old Spindletop, the most famous well of all time, came in a roaring gusher, blowing oil up through the tower at the rate of 4.2 million gallons per day 150 feet into the air.  We have all seen pictures of this amazing site.

Gushers roaring through well derricks in tales of the oil business, in pictures and photographs and in the movies are a visual icon seared into all our minds.  But what is the truth?  Crude oil is “dirty”, greasy and combustible.  Why “Old Spindletop” did not catch fire is a wonder of the ages, considering that the drill rig was powered by a coal fired steam engine.  It didn’t, but other wells were not so lucky.  Additionally, how do you contain the fluid from a well that is flowing 4+ million gallons a day?  Obviously, something had to be done.  The old timers built a berm around the site, creating a pond to contain the oil.  Many horses, many fresnos … lots of work.  And in spite of all, as more and more wells came in, much of the oil got away, running down hill into nearby streams and thence into the nearby ocean.  I have been told that in those early days the State of Texas actually passed a law called the “Two Log Rule.”  This was done out of a sense of fair play.  The State ruled, that as the oil floated down a river, any individual could put a boom of two logs laid end to end tied to a cable stretched across the stream to catch the floating oil.  After one person’s log trap filled with oil, the surplus would go around the end of it into the next man’s trap and so on.  Need one doubt that there was a nasty mess around some of the fields.  Surely, but there is not a trace of it now.  Today our government would call the oil that the old timers eagerly gathered an “environmental disaster.”  The old timers cleaned it up and made a tidy profit doing it.

The oil companies didn’t like the oil getting away from them and they certainly were not thrilled with the specter of oil field fires.  Using good old Yankee (Rebel?) ingenuity they decided to do something about it.  What they came up with was a control system.  First, every oil well was overbored to a calculated “safe” depth (nowadays 1000 to 2000 feet deep) and a “surface casing” was installed loosely into the hole and cemented from bottom to top.  After the cement set, a very sophisticated system of valves, a “blowout preventer,” was attached to the top of the “surface” and thereafter the rig set up to drill through it.  Only then was the drilling for product commenced.

The blowout preventer is an interesting piece of machinery.  It is essentially a stack of special purpose valves that are securely attached to the cemented surface pipe.  It consists of a hydraulic accumulator that is a dome like vessel that contains enough oil to actuate the hydraulic pistons that close the valves on the stack.  Over the oil in the vessel, highly compressed nitrogen at about 5000 psi or more is poised to actuate the system.  The “stack” is a stack of progressively severe valves.  Most “gushers” start when the drill bit enters a formation of highly compressed methane that has pressure enough to overcome the weight of the drilling fluid above.  When this happens, the drilling mud is blown out of the hole and all hell breaks loose.  When the driller senses that a “kick” or a blowout is beginning he actuates the preventer, stopping the surge.  The sequence goes like this:  the first valve is a donut like an tire inner tube that is inflated around the drill pipe closing the annulus were the mud and cuttings are ascending from the bit; if that fails, the second is a circular clamp in two pieces that closes against drill pipe from two sides that encircles the drill pipe; and that failing, the third is a metal shear the slices through the drill pipe severing it and seals the well like a gate valve would.  With preventers on wells being drilled at ground surface, there is sometimes and additional manual valve that can be closed.  Many preventers have redundancies of this series of valves built in.

The blowout preventer has been used on literally hundreds of thousands of wells absolutely stopping the specter of the “gusher.”  The blow out preventer is a simple, but highly sophisticated machine and if properly used, as fail safe as anything man made can be.  They are a standard, legally required part of drilling an oil well.  It would be unthinkable, and fool hardy, to drill a well without one.

If we have a failure, as is apparent presently in the Gulf of Mexico, it is not due to lack of technology and certainly not from a lack of bureaucratic oversight and regulation, it must be something else.

Things that come to mind that could have happened in the Gulf are not too hard to visualize.  Among some of the possibilities are … the well in question could have been constructed in a non-standard manner allowing the surface pipe seal to fail or there could have been a “kick” that was not detected that allowed the gas to reach the surface and explode, killing the operators before they could react to actuate the preventer.  On the knee jerk side … Michael Savage, the radio talk show host, says that the North Koreans torpedoed the South Korean drill rig being operated by a British company in American waters out of spite.  On the conspiracy side … considering the Obama administration’s headlong rush to nationalize our major industries, can we rule out sabotage?  Why would the failure of one well be the impetus to shut down all the drilling in not only in the Gulf of Mexico, but all off shore wells … and even on-land wells 5000 miles away in Alaska, unless the government was intentionally trying to induce a fuel shortage and to take over the industry?

The idea that we must have new regulations or a “search for new solutions” or a “study” to replace a proven technology that has been an industry standard for 70 years is ludicrous.  Was this incident caused by the technology or by human error … or worse?