Oilfield Technology

From eccentric wheels to the counter-balanced "nodding donkey," inventing ways to produce oil. In a remote northwestern Pennsylvania valley on August 27, 1859, Edwin L. Drake completed America's first commercial oil well — launching the U.S. petroleum industry. Drake borrowed a common kitchen hand-pump to retrieve the important new resource from a depth …

History of Petroleum Technology

History of Petroleum Technology. Follow the history of innovations in petroleum technology by selecting the left or right arrows, or scroll to a specific time from the timebar below.

History of offshore drilling units

The first MODU. The first truly offshore MODU was the Mr. Charlie, designed and constructed from scratch by Ocean Drilling and Exploration Co. (ODECO), headed by its inventor and president, "Doc" Alden J. Laborde.The Mr. Charlie (Fig. 2) was a purpose-built submersible barge built specifically to float on its lower hull to location and, in a sequence of flooding the …

Petroleum production

Petroleum production - Drilling, Refining, Extraction: Early oil wells were drilled with impact-type tools in a method called cable-tool drilling. A weighted chisel-shaped bit was suspended from a cable to a lever at the surface, where an up-and-down motion of the lever caused the bit to chip away the rock at the bottom of the hole. The drilling had to be halted …

Edwin Drake and the Oil Well Drill Pipe

His innovative method of drilling for oil using an iron pipe not only caused a "black gold rush" but also placed him in the books of oil industry history. Edwin Drake was born on March 29, 1819 in Greenville, New York. ... "Uncle Billy" used …

History of Oil

The invention of the first modern steam engine, at the beginning of the 18th century, heralded the transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. ... The success of Edwin Drake's oil well drilling operations in Titusville, however, would attract attention. Within a decade, John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company would come ...

World's First Oil Well | Invention & Technology Magazine

On July 14, 1848 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Major Alekseev supervised the completion of a 20+ meter well, reaching a small pocket of crude oil, thus establishing the world's very first oil well. The process used was an archaic technique known as cable-tool drilling, employed for hundreds of years in ancient China.

Oil and Gas Industry: A Research Guide

The natural gas industry shifted to heating and cooking applications, and the oil industry found demand in the newly invented automobile. In 1909, anti-trust laws forced Standard Oil into 34 different companies, but by the 1940s three of them, along with four other international companies, grew to dominate the market and were nicknamed the ...

Evolution of directional drilling since 1900

drilling to contact larger quantity of oil and gas reserves, thereby minimizing associated drilling costs, as well as envi ronmental impact. 1900-1920s Directional drilling has come a long way since its origins. Through most of the 1800s, wells ostensibly went in only one direction—straight down. It was in the 1920s that the

A Very Brief History of Offshore Drilling

1971: Offshore production in federal waters reached 1.7 million barrels a day, roughly 20 percent of U.S. production. 1975: The first discovery in deep water — depths of 1,000 feet or more, though definitions vary — came …

First Oil Discoveries

Thomas Edison then invented the first practical incandescent light in 1879, which would remove demand for the oil industry's principle product, kerosene. ... the young U.S. petroleum industry reached the West Coast in the late 1870s with the first California oil well. After drilling three wells beginning in 1875, California Star Oil Works ...

Who Made America? | Innovators | Edwin Drake

1819, Greenville, NY 1880, Bethlehem, PA. Before drilling made oil available in large quantities, small amounts for uses could be collected by placing blankets to soak up the oily scum ...

Drilling Technology

Petroleum exploration technologies have evolved from ancient "spring poles," to steam-powered percussion cable-tools, to modern rotary rigs with steerable, diamond bits that can drill miles …

Drilling | New Technologies, Innovations

Multilateral Drilling. Sometimes oil and natural gas reserves are located in separate layers underground and multilateral drilling allows producers to branch out from the main well to tap reserves at different depths. This increases …

History of Oil Industry

Today oil is the main energy resource in the world. In Romania petroleum industry started in 1857 when brothers Marin and Theodor Mehedinţeanu from Ploiești, distilled, in the plant they conceived, 275 tons of lamp oil, used in the street lighting of Bucharest city (Buliga 2007).The year of 1857 also marked the birth of the world's petroleum industry (Buliga 2007; …

Episode 2,2006: Howard Hughes' Invention, San Jose, …

of the 20th century, the Hughes Tool Company made most of its money selling and leasing the twin-cone drill bit for oil drilling. That's the device Haden says his grandfather invented. This is interesting. Here's an account of how Howard Hughes Sr. got hold of that invention, and it doesn't mention Haden's grandfather.

The Evolution of Oil Drilling: From Ancient Techniques to …

Oil and gas acquisition has a rich and fascinating history that spans centuries, evolving from rudimentary methods to the sophisticated technologies we see today. This blog …

Edwin Drake | American Oil Pioneer & Father of the Oil …

Edwin Drake was the driller of the first productive oil well in the United States. Raised on farms in New York and Vermont, Drake worked as a hotel and dry-goods clerk …

Technology and the "Conroe Crater"

A Great Depression-era disaster in a giant oilfield near Conroe, Texas, brought together the inventor of portable drilling rigs and the father of directional drilling. George E. Failing and H. John Eastman employed new technologies that allowed "the bit …

Top 5 Innovations in Oil Drilling

One of the earliest innovations to improve oil drilling was the rotary drill, first used in the 1880s. This used a rotating drill bit to dig into the ground (as opposed to Drake's method …

Drake, Edwin | Invention & Technology Magazine

The drilling of this oil well marks the modern phase of the petroleum industry. A series of revolutionary technological changes, unforeseen even by the most prophetic, followed. Drake demonstrated practical oil recovery by applying salt-well drilling techniques, including the use of the , and invented the modern method of driving iron pipe.

History of Oil: The Birth of the Modern Oil Industry …

This article traces the development of the modern oil industry from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. The history is divided chronologically into: (1) The Drake discovery in Pennsylvania and American oil industry; (2) Mid-nineteenth century oil wells outside America; (3) growth of the oil industry in late nineteenth-to-early-twentieth centuries; (4) First …

The Birth and Development of Horiozntal …

Horizontal directional drilling is an idea Martin Cherrington first conjured up in the early 1960s when he was working for a utility install company in L.A. ... Martin Cherrington does not have a Wikipedia page explaining how …

How did Edwin Drake create the World's first oil well

Edwin Drake's oil fundamentally changed this process and dramatically increased oil production around the world. Instead of harvesting oil in a pail or sopping it up with rags and …

First Oil Well Inventor Edwin Drake

The first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859 by Edwin Drake, who started the oil industry though he only drilled three oil wells in his career.

American Edwin L. Drake Drills the First Oil Well (1859)

In 1858, Edwin Drake was offered the job of helping to arrange for property rights to drill for oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania. Accomplishing this, he next began to make plans to drill for oil using technology already well established for water and salt extraction. ... The first plastic, bakelite, was made in 1909 by the inventor Leo ...

The history of oil refining and well drilling.

The invention of heating oil happened soon after when M.A. Fessler invented the oil burner to take advantage of the crude oil discoveries in California. The company he founded, Fess System Co., eventually became Petro. ... Historic …

The Evolution of Oil Drilling: From Ancient …

What lies beneath – The Early Beginnings of Oil Drilling. ... Semisubmersible rig. Mr. Charlie was an industry-transforming invention - driving the oil and gas industry into deeper-anchored environments, and deeper …

Mr. Charlie Oil Drilling Rig | Invention & Technology …

Mr. Charlie would go on to drill hundreds of wells—a cumulative 2.3 million feet up and down the Gulf Coast for Shell Oil, as well as many other oil companies. By the mid-1980s, offshore drilling activity had moved beyond 40 foot depths, rendering Mr. Charlie ineffective for larger projects.

How Howard Hughes Revolutionized Oil Well Drilling

Drilling for oil isn't that easy, at least not in the early years of 1900 when Hughes began his interest in oil. ... Before his death in 1924, Hughes was granted over 70 patents for inventions related to rotary drilling. Hughes Legacy . Howard R. Hughes Sr. passed away on January 24, 1924 of a heart attack while at his offices in the Humble Oil ...