WorldWide Drilling Resource

29 AUGUST 2015 Seeing James Dean celebrate while oil poured like rain from the sky made for great entertainment in the 1956 movie Giant . However, in real life, by the time Giant was made, well control and blowout prevention technology had been in place for over 30 years. One of the most famous real-life high-pressure oil blowouts occurred at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, on January 10, 1901. A three-man drilling crew was at work when a six-inch stream of oil and gas erupted 100 feet into the air. The incident was described in the local paper as, “An Oil Geyser - Remarkable Phenomenon of South Beaumont - Gas Blows Pipe from Well and a Flow of Oil Equaled Nowhere Else on Earth.” In the nine days following the gusher at Spindletop Hill, about 500,000 barrels of oil spewed from the well before a shutoff valve for the well could be fitted to the casing to stop the flow. Even so, these images of giant gushers attracted investors for years to come. James Abercrombie of Huntsville, Texas, had personally experienced the danger of uncontrollable oil blowouts first hand. He gave an account of one narrow escape: “With a roar like a hundred express trains racing across the countryside, the well blew out, spewing oil in all directions. 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 had begun his oil career as a roustabout, and by 1920 he owned several rigs in south Texas. He decided to join forces with Harry Cameron, who he described as “a great machine-tool man” after meeting him at work in a machine shop. The two men formed Cameron Iron Works to repair drill rigs, and sell supplies and parts. Abercrombie wanted to find a solution to control the underground pressure encountered when drilling. He came up with an idea for a “ram-type” blowout preventer - using rams (hydrostatic pistons) to close on the drill stem and form a seal against well pressure. He sketched his idea on the sawdust floor of the Cameron Iron Works machine shop in Humble, Texas. Abercrombie and Cameron used simple, rugged parts to work out the details. When their invention was installed on a wellhead, the rams could be closed off, allowing full control of pressure during drilling and production. In 1922, their Type MO blowout preventer (BOP) could withstand pressures of up to 3000 pounds per square inch. They continued to improve upon their invention and in December 1931, Abercrombie patented a lifesaving BOP that quickly became the industry standard for safe drilling. Modern blowout BOPs include not only ram-types using steel rams to seal the borehole, like Abercrombie’s patents, but also annular BOPs and spherical BOPs stacked for redundancy, capable of with- standing pressures of 20,000 pounds per square inch. Early contributions of people like Abercrombie and Cameron not only made the search for gas and oil much safer, but also more productive and sensitive to the environment. In 2003, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers recog- nized the Cameron Ram-Type Blowout Preventer as a “Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark”. 3"- 0)'! +#0* /'! /,,). '+ ./,!( '4#. 6 /, 6 +(. ,1* + 13 -"#+ ))#3 5 2 - 0!&*$% !,* 5 - 0!&*$% $-,+/'#-+#/ !,* ,"#) '4#. /#+/ + " #+"'+% The End of Oil Gushers Spindletop Hill, Texas, 1901 Adapted from Information Provided by the American Oil and Gas Historical Society WorldWide Drilling Resource ® DEADLINES: Space Reservation - AUGUST 25 TH Display & Classified Ad Copy - SEPTEMBER 1 ST Reserve your place in WWDR ’s October issue! Call (850) 547-0102