Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube

The Oil Industry (Business)

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Jan 03, 2018
4 min read

Table of contents

Child pages


Web articles



Discovery / Exploration

Summary of my understanding

  • In the early days, oil was easy to find: it was coming out of the ground on its own, and you just had to walk past it to see that it was there.
  • As people exhausted all of the oil that they could find and extract with their existing tools and techniques, they were forced to develop new theories and tools for finding oil in harder-to-find places.


Books

  • 1975 - Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum
    • This one looks like it's worth checking out, even as expensive as it is.
    • "After introductory chapters on the early oil industry and the state of early European and American geologic theories, the book covers thinking about and activity in exploration around the globe at 10- or 20-year intervals between 1860 and 1920. These 445 pages of early history are followed by 515 pages on activity in the United States and Canada after 1920. Exploration in Central and South America, the Middle East, Russia, Africa and the Far East, and Europe and the North Sea is covered in the next 600 pages. There is also a concluding chapter of philosophical reflections on the changing patterns in oil exploration and production. The book describes the changes through time in the geologic thought that has guided most of this exploration; it credits the men and organizations chiefly involved in both successes and failures; and it effectively shows the historical relationship between the need for petroleum, economics, governmental action, and the search itself." (Source)
    • "In 1927 [the author] became the chief geology advisor for Lew Wentz, a major Texas oilman, a position Owen held for many years. (...) The History of Geology course that Owen helped initiate at UT-Austin led to the compilation, with a few other collaborators, of a 1600-page documentary named Trek of The Oil Finders, a memoir volume published by the AAPG in 1975." (Source)
  • 2009 - Hell's Half Acre: Early Days in the Great Alberta Oil Patch
  • 2011 - Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920
    • Summary
      • Part 1. Local Knowledge
        • 1. Vernacular Authority in the Oil Field
        • 2. Collaborative Authority: Nineteenth-Century Foundations of Petroleum Geology
      • Part 2. Contested Knowledge
        • 3. Shared Authority: Practical Oil Men and Professional Geologists
        • 4. Institutional Authority: Field Work, Universities, and Surveys
      • Part 3. Appropriated Knowledge
        • 5. Geology Organized: Henry L. Doherty's Technological System
  • 2016 - Oil Capital: The History of American Oil, Wildcatters, Independents and Their Bankers


Web articles


Journal Articles

  • 1966.12 - AAPG Bulletin - History of Petroleum Geology and Its Bearing Upon Present and Future Exploration
    • "The history of petroleum geology began with formulations of the anticlinal accumulation of oil by three different geologists as early as 1861--within 18 months after the Drake discovery. During the next half century this basic idea underwent many vicissitudes, because oil was found in a great variety of structural positions. The period of 1910-1935, which can be regarded as the "Golden Age" of petroleum geology, was a period of fundamental and provocative inquiry into basic questions of origin, migration, and entrapment of oil and gas. Then followed a period of stagnation based on the illusion that the answers to fundamental problems were known. As a consequence, the practice of petroleum geology degenerated into deadening routines of putting rock geometry on maps, and drilling the geometric highs.

      This state of complacency has been disturbed during recent years as the result of a renewed inquiry originating in industry research laboratories concerning the physics of the rock-water-oil system, and showing that stable accumulations of oil and gas are possible in plunging noses and structural terraces, homoclinal dips, and even in the deep, structurally negative parts of geosynclinal basins. As yet, however, this knowledge does not appear to have exercised much influence on the thinking or practices of rank-and-file petroleum geologists.

      Because the oil discoveries resulting from conventional practices, many of which are based on invalid premises of hydrostatics, have passed the point of diminishing returns, and because it is physically possible that large undiscovered accumulations of oil exist which now would be found only by accident, or not at all, perhaps the time has come when petroleum geologists should abandon their preoccupation with over-simple ideas of structural and stratigraphic traps, and return to a recognition that the basic problems of petroleum geology are inseparable from the physical behavior of oil and gas in a combination rock-water environment."
    • This may be worth buying, although the abstract seems to give me enough of an idea of what was going on that further detail may not be that important.


Videos



Drilling technology


Books

  • 2005 - Roughnecks, Rock Bits, and Rigs: The Evolution of Oil Well Drilling Technology in Alberta, 1883-1970
    • "It is the first comprehensive study to focus on the technologies that made Alberta's oil industry viable. Author Sandy Gow provides an in-depth look at the evolution of oil well drilling technology from 1883 through 1970, the era of conventional oil exploration in the province. During the early exploration years, the individuals working in the oilfield developed and adapted technologies, such as drill bits and power sources, to suit their specific needs, largely through trial and error. This spirit of innovation and ingenuity is captured in accounts of the evolution of drilling processes and equipment, as well as in the personal stories of those who worked on the rigs."


Follow me on Twitter