Drake Oil Well example essay topic

The Early Petroleum Industry in the United States Ancient Egyptians used bitumen for embalming, the Assyrians used it in building, the Chinese for heating and lighting, and for centuries fishermen have used it to make their boats watertight. Naturally, man being what he is, was not content to let well alone, and soon petra- oleum (rock oil) and its associated products were being used in many delightful ways to cripple and annihilate his fellow men. The famous 'Green Fire' was used in various forms for many centuries once it became known that when a mixture of petroleum and ground quicklime is exposed to moisture spontaneous combustion takes place. The flaming mixture thus produced was thrown by a pump mounted on the prow of a warship and the consequent havoc wrought on the enemy's ships can easily be imagined. Then oddly enough, the ancients knowledge of the properties of petroleum seemed to fall into abeyance and during the Middle Ages, and up to the beginning of the 19th century, petroleum was only remembered for its medicinal uses. It was to capitalize on this use that an American, Samuel Kier, decided to bottle the oil that seeped into his father's brine wells.

He put it up in half pint bottles and advertised it as containing wonderful medical virtues. Another American George H. Bissell, saw his advertisement but was interested in oil for other reasons so, together with a friend, he leased 105 acres of farmland, near Titusville, Pennsylvania, paying $5,000 dollars for a 99 year lease. So in 1854 the first oil lease was granted. Having obtained the land, which he was fairly certain covered oil deposits, Bissell commissioned Edwin & Drake to drill a well for him.

Drake did so and struck oil on August 27th, 1859. The first oil well had been sunk and a great industry had been born. Within a few months of the completion of the Drakwell, oil wells were being sunk all over the United States and within two years the country was exporting great quantities of oil. Simple distillation of seep and salt well oil was being carried out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by Samuel Kier who built a one-barrel still.

He was buying crude by the gallon. Later Kier made a still of five-barrel capacity. These two stills for treating crude oil constituted the first commercial refinery in America. The five-barrel apparatus of Kier has survived and is in the Drake Well Museum.

Although immeasurably important to the American oil industry, Kier's refining enterprise at Pittsburgh was not the first petroleum refining venture. James Young patented a process in England in 1850 that carried out fractional distillation of petroleum from a seep at a coal mine and later from oil shale. Young can be considered the principal founder of the world's oil refinery industry (Dickey, 1958). More than for any other purpose, crude oil at first was refined to improve its use as an illuminant.

Lighting, in itself, created the great demand for oil that led to the frantic drilling of the pioneer oil wells along Oil Creek in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The crude petroleum, as it comes from the wells, is a rather greasy yellow, or dark brown, liquid which occurs in vast deposits all over the world. It is a very complex substance and it is quite impossible in an article of this nature to delve its chemistry, but, as we shall see later, it is broken down into various constituents when it reaches the refinery. The science of well drilling is not new, in fact it was practiced in 201 BC in China, where brine wells, some over 3,000 feet deep, were drilled. Today there are two principal methods of drilling, the percussion, in which a bit is suspended from a cable and alternatively lifted and dropped to crush the rock, and the rotary, in which the bit is fastened to the bottom of a pipe shaft and revolved to drill its way into the earth. The percussion method is now only used for drilling shallow wells.

In the rotary method the drill and the machinery that drives it are housed in a tall steel latticework tower called a derrick. This is erected in a cement lined excavation which may be from ten to twenty feet deep. In the centre of the derrick and immediately over the well head is set a revolving steel turntable in the centre of which is a square or hexagon hole through which the pipe carrying the bit is fed. As soon as the engines are started the turntable revolves and the bit begins to drill into the earth. As it drills deeper more sections of pipe are added until eventually the bit strikes oil. The pip carrying the bit serves a dual purpose.

It is obvious that as the bit bores deeper into the earth debris will be formed which must be removed to allow the bit free passage. In addition, of course, the bit must be kept cool. This is accomplished in a simple yet ingenious manner. A special 'drilling mud' consisting mainly of clay and water is continuously pumped down the inside of the pipe and is then forced up again round the outside of the pipe, thus cooling the bit and removing the debris at the same time.

To control the flow of oil from the 'gusher' once oil has been struck, a device called a blow-out prevent or is fitted into the bore hole. This arrangement of valves which allows oil to be piped to the refineries or storage tanks is colloquially called a 'Christmas Tree'. The drilling rig is then dismantled and can be used on another site. When the crude oil is delivered to the refinery it has to be sorted out into its different constituent parts.

Essentially, the method used is based on the fact that various liquids boil at different temperatures. For instance, when crude oil is heated the first of its constituents to boil and vaporize is petrol. This is distilled out and the crude oil heated further until the next constituent, paraffin, is vaporized. Next comes gas oil, then various lubricating oils, and finally all that remains is an asphaltic bitumen t, or waxy residue, according to the type of oil being processed. Petroleum is one of the two or three basic materials in chemical manufacturing and processing.

It's uses are almost infinite, and it is used in, to name but a few: plastics, synthetic fibres, paint, detergents, rubber, fertilizers, dry cleaning, linoleum, printing and candles. In fact - the world today is so dependent on oil that this could almost be called the Oil Age Abraham Gesner [b. Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, May 2, 1797, d. Halifax, Nova Scotia, April 29, 1864], who first made a flammable liquid (that he named kerosene) from oil shale in 1846 and later from coal, begins to manufacture kerosene from coal in New York State. Kerosene quickly replaces whale oil as the most popular illuminating liquid, but when kerosene is extracted from petroleum by Samuel Kier [b. Livermore, Pennsylvania, 1813, d.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 6, 1874], also starting in this year, Gesner's coal-based process loses out to the new form of kerosene In the search for brine, a was drilled on the Lemuel Stockton farm along Little Reno x Creek, near Burkes ville, Cumberland County, Kentucky. This well came to be known as the Old American Well and was an early 'gusher'. Drilled by Col. Emerson to a depth of 171 feet using a spring pole rig, the well came in on March 11, 1829. The drill bit and rope were shot out of hole and a solid stream of oil was 'thrown to the top of the surrounding trees.

' Oil flowed into the Cumberland River and covered the surface of the river downstream for 40 or 50 miles. The oil ignited, catching many miles of the river on fire and halting riverboat traffic. It burned for 3 weeks. Between 1829 and 1860 the Old American Well is estimated to have produced 50,000 barrels of oil. Much of that oil ended up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Samuel Kier either sold it as medicine or refined it into lamp oil.

The well was documented in early technical journals, see, for example, 'Naphtha Quelle in Amerika,' Dingler's Polytechnic al Journal, 1836. In 1859 the first well every drilled for the purpose of recovering underground oil was successfully accomplished by "Colonel" E.L. Drake at Titusville, Pennsylvania. A bronze plaque placed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers marks the site as a national historic landmark. The plaque reads, "The drilling of this oil well by Edwin L. Drake in 1859, is the event recognized as marking the modern phase of the petroleum industry. A series of revolutionary technological changes, unforeseen even by the most prophetic, followed. An emerging course of concentrated energy and abundant chemical compounds, petroleum supported sweeping changes in our mode of illumination, power development, transportation, and industrial chemistry.

Few events in history have so transformed the face of civilization". The Drake Oil Well showed that vast quantities of underground oil could be obtained by utilization of salt-well drilling techniques. Prior to the drilling of the Drake Oil Well the standard method of oil recovery was to utilize surface seeps where a mixture of oil and water rose to surface as a spring. The area of the spring was walled off into a narrow enclosure and blankets and wool cloths were spread across the surface to absorb the floating oil.

Then a person would wring out the saturated cloths into tubs that held the fairly pure oil. A single person could obtain about 10 gallons of oil a day by this method if he worked steadily.