Lawrence Wright did the historical research and brings it up to date for readers of The New Yorker. Read it at The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil. Here's a excerpt in the part about the early days with a colorful picture of the first gusher:
Around the turn of the twentieth century, near Beaumont—on the Gulf Coast, close to the Louisiana state line—there was a sulfurous hill called Sour Spring Mound. Natural gas was perpetually seeping to the surface, and schoolboys sometimes set the hill afire. Patillo Higgins, a disreputable local businessman who had lost an arm in a gunfight with a deputy sheriff, became convinced that oil was trapped below the mound. At the time, wells weren’t drilled; they were essentially pounded into the earth, using a heavy bit that was repeatedly lifted and dropped, chiselling its way through the strata. There was quicksand beneath Sour Spring Mound, and it confounded any attempt to bore a stable hole. Nevertheless, the persistent Higgins forecast that oil would be struck at a thousand feet beneath the surface—a figure he simply made up.
In 1898, Higgins hired a mining engineer, Captain Anthony F. Lucas, to help him dig wells at Sour Spring Mound. Lucas’s first effort delved only five hundred and seventy-five feet before the pipe collapsed. He decided to try a novel device called a rotary bit, which turned out to be more suitable for penetrating soft layers. The drillers at the site also discovered that by pumping mud down the hole a kind of concrete formed, which buttressed the sides. These innovations created the modern drilling industry.
Lucas and his team hoped to establish a well that could produce fifty barrels of oil a day. On January 10, 1901, at a thousand and twenty feet—almost precisely the depth predicted by Higgins’s wild guess—the well suddenly vomited mud, and then ejected six tons of drilling pipe clear over the top of the derrick. Nobody had seen anything like this, and it was terrifying. In the unnerving silence that followed, the drilling team, drenched in mud, crept back to the site and began cleaning up debris. Then they heard a roar from deep in the earth, from an era millions of years ago. More mud flew up, followed by rocks and gas and then by oil, which spouted a hundred and fifty feet into the air: a black fountain surging from the arterial wound that the drillers had made. It was the greatest oil discovery in history. For the next nine days, until the well was capped, the gusher spurted into the air a hundred thousand barrels of oil a day—an output that exceeded the production of all the other wells in America combined. After the first year of operation, the well, which Higgins named Spindletop, was producing seventeen million barrels a year.
It's a long article, and that was just a taste. The article published in the print edition of the January 1, 2018, issue was titled “The Glut Economy.” Apparently, they thought "The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil" would be more appealing to the web audience.
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3:04 PM 12/26/2017
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