A True History of Oil and Gas Development
E. R. Crain, P.Eng.
Spectrum 2000 Mindware
1-403-845-2527 ross@spec2000.net
Originally published CWLS InSite Sept 2004
INTRODUCTION
The traditional view of the oil industry is that it started in the USA in 1859. Not true, I’m afraid.
The oil seeps at Baku (in present-day Azerbaijan) flowed freely centuries before year 1. They played a major role around 600 BC in the Zoroastrian religion of Persia and India. Uses of petroleum are mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible. Chinese and Japanese writings that predate the first millennium by as much as 900 years describe the use of natural gas and oil from natural flows, seeps, and hand dug wells. Credit for the first drilled oil well goes to the Chinese in the year 347 BC.
Sumerians burned oil in pans for lighting as early as 4500 BC. Oil lamps appeared around 500 BC. A town near Grenoble France had natural gas street lamps in the year 100 !! Oil streetlights appeared in Cordoba around 900, London in 1414, and Paris in 1524.
EARLY DISCOVERIES AROUND THE WORLD
Sir Thomas Shirley presented a paper to the Royal Society in 1658 on natural gas flows in Britain. In 1739, V. I. Veitbrecht published an article “About Oil” in the Russian scientific magazine “Primechaniya na Vedomosti” where he described the Baku area oil wells and provided a plan of the oil and gas fields. This may be the first technical paper with a reservoir description.
Coal-gas (manufactured gas) dates back to 1726 in England. Oil was extracted from oil sands in Pechelbron France in 1735. Creation of coal-oil by distillation of coal and oil shales occurred between 1781 and 1820 in England, France, and Germany.
In 1626 Joseph de la Roche d’Allion, a Jesuit priest from France based at Trois Rivieres in Quebec, reported oil seeps in what is now New York state. Peter Pond was the first non-native to report the discovery of oil in Canada in 1778 at the Athabasca oil sands in northeast Alberta.
A Canadian, Dr. Abraham Gesner, developed the distillation of kerosene from crude oil in 1846. Kerosene helped reduce the use of whale oil for illumination. Some claim the whale oil problem had already been overcome by manufactured gas and oil from coal, but the two events certainly helped the “Save the Whales” campaign. The Americans give Benjamin Sillian credit for the invention of kerosene in 1855, but he was at least third in line after Gesner and a Polish druggist named Ignacy Lukasiewicz (1853). Coal-oil and kerosene are the same product – just different sources.
Azerbaijan claims the first drilled well in the modern era at Bibi-Heybat, a suburb of Baku on the Caspian Sea, in 1846. The first drilled oil wells in Europe were located near Bucharest in Romania in 1857 but Poland makes the same claim for 1854 at Bobrka.
The completion of the first commercial oil well in North America occurred in 1858 at Oil Springs, Lambton County, Ontario and was quickly followed by more oil at Petrolia, Ontario. The man’s name was James Miller Williams. This was a hand dug well and the first drilled wells came in 1862. Some of these flowed up to 7000 barrels per day, often before anyone thought to build a storage pit or tank. Some of the early oil flowed down creeks to be wasted in the Great Lakes, but it had been doing that for eons before, from natural seepage.
There was an Oil Springs and a Petrolia in Pennsylvania too, but these wells came a year later (Edwin Drake, Titusville, 1859). There’s a Petrolia in Texas, and another in California, not to mention the park in Baku set up by the Nobel brothers. It gets confusing.
It would appear that Drake’s well placed the USA sixth in line in the sweepstakes for who drilled the first oil well, after China, Azerbaijan, Poland, Romania, and Canada. Drake’s well, drilled to a depth of 69.5 feet, pumped oil at the inconsequential rate of 8 to 10 gallons a day. Some historians claim this is the USA’s first commercial oil well. Drake himself never drilled another well but his discovery started a drilling rush in the area. His derrick burned down a few months later, killing nine men. He became an oil buyer and then a stock broker on Wall Street specializing in, you guessed it, oil stocks.
History of Oil and Gas in Canada
As noted earlier, Peter Pond was the first non-native to report the discovery of oil in Canada in 1778 at what is now the Athabasca oil sands. Canada’s first commercial oil wells were found in Oil Springs and Petrolia, near Sarnia, Ontario, in 1858, a year before Edwin Drake’s discovery at Oil Springs (Titusville), Pennsylvania. Both the Oil Springs discoveries were known before these dates from flowing seeps.
The subsequent development of Canada’s first petroleum complex at Petrolia is a little known part of the industrial saga of the oil industry. Canada’s chemical valley in Sarnia traces its ancestry directly to this area. During the period 1861 to 1897, nearly the entire requirement of Canada for crude, lubricants, waxes, kerosene, gasoline, and a widening range of chemicals for food, medicine, and industry was produced here. From 1863 to 1870, Canada was a major exporter of crude and refined products to the United States and Europe.
The contribution that Canadians made to the world’s petroleum industry during the same period is even less appreciated. Men trained in the production, transportation, refining, and administration of this new resource, took their knowledge and skills to every corner of the world, opening many of the great oil fields that are still major suppliers of crude. They laboured on every continent in a hundred different countries. And the tradition continues to this day.
For more on this topic, look at “Hard Oiler! – The Story of Early Canadian’s Quest for Oil at Home and Abroad“, by Gary May, 1998, Hounslow Press, ISBN: 1550023160. “Petroleum in Canada” by Victor Ross, 1917, Southam Press gives a similar and more contemporaneous view.
New Brunswick achieved commercial production at Stoney Creek in 1884, although it was pretty minor by early Ontario standards, and these wells continued in production until modern times. Quebec, Prince Edward Island, onshore Nova Scotia, and onshore Newfoundland never found commercial quantities of oil or gas.
The first gas well in Alberta was drilled in 1883 at Alderson (then known as Langevin Siding), near Medicine Hat, by the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were, of course, looking for water. This well struck gas, caught fire, burned down the rig injuring one man who had to jump off, and was abandoned. A second well, the following year, again struck gas (it was only 8 feet away from the first one) and produced off-and-on for about 40 years. These, and similar wells, came to the notice of the Canadian government.
Dr. George Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada, collected information on the wells at Langevin Siding and others, and presented a paper to the Royal Society of Canada in May, 1886. The paper was called “On Certain Borings in Manitoba and the Northwest Territory”. The paper contained detailed sample descriptions of the wells – possibly the first “well logs” in Western Canada.
By the early 1890s several more wells had been drilled in the Medicine Hat area, producing gas for homes and factories. Rudyard Kipling, on a visit in the early 1900’s, admited that he liked Medicine Hat but “It has all hell for a basement!”
By 1908, development of the Bow Island gas field led to the first pipelines to deliver natural gas to Alberta communities. Construction of a 16-inch pipeline from southwest of Medicine Hat to Calgary began in April 1912 and was completed in only 86 days. A second leg reached Lethbridge in July the same year. This was spearheaded by Eugene Coste, Canada’s first natural gas engineer. He had discovered the first commercial gas well in Essex County Ontario in 1888.
The Alberta oil boom didn’t begin until 1914 with the drilling of Dingman #1 near Turner Valley. A replica of the drilling rig lives at Heritage Park in Calgary. This wet gas success started a stock market flurry that died less than a year later with the loss of most of the investors’ money.
The well was the precursor for the deeper zone discovery drilled ten years later. Royalite #4 put Turner Valley on the oil and gas map for real.
In 1919, Imperial Oil geologist Ted Link, a crew of six drillers and an ox named “Nig” made a six-week, 1200 mile journey northward by railway, river boat, and on foot to the site now known as Norman Wells NWT, along the Mackenzie River. The ox helped to build a log house and put the drilling rig in place before being butchered to provide food for the winter. Drilling resumed in the spring with the world’s most northerly oil discovery coming in August 1920.
Between 1920 and 1947, there were a dozen or so significant oil discoveries in the Cretaceous of Alberta, but no “elephants”, and nothing very deep. Vern Hunter drilled Imperial Oil’s Leduc #1 Devonian oil discovery in 1947, ending a long dry spell in the Alberta search. Although minor shows were found much earlier, 1951 saw the first commercial oil discoveries in Manitoba and NE British Columbia, followed by Saskatchewan 1953. Over the next 20 years, Canada became self sufficient in oil and gas.
As early as 1921, Dr. Karl Clark pioneered the extraction of oil from tar sands by the hot water process. He built pilot plants in 1930 at Clearwater and in 1949 at Bitumont under the auspices of the Alberta Research Council. Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd (later Suncor) began production of the Athabasca tar sands north of Fort McMurray in 1967. Shell drilled offshore British Columbia that year, but found nothing. A few years later, the BC Government placed a moratorium on further drilling that has not been lifted.
On the other frontiers, hydrocarbons were found offshore Nova Scotia (gas at Sable Island, 1967, oil at Cohasset, 1973), offshore Newfoundland (oil at Terra Nova, 1984), offshore in the Beaufort Sea and MacKenzie Delta (gas at Taglu, 1971, oil at Amauligak, 1978), onshore and offshore in the High Arctic Islands (gas at Drake Point, 1969 – oil at Bent Horn, 1974). It took between 20 and 30 years for some of these to come on-stream, and Arctic gas is still shut-in.
Note: Historical photos are taken from websites listed below.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank Micky Gulless of Fuzzy Logic for helpful suggestions on this article, Micky published the original research on the Alderson wells, which I found on the Petroleum History Society website.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
These websites cover most of the information described in this article. I certify that the material has not been “ralphed”.
1. Chronology of Oil – Azerbaijan http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/
ai102_folder/102_articles/102_oil_chronology.html
2. Chronology of Natural and Manufactured Gas http://www.hatheway.net/01_history.htm
3. Chronology of Oil – World http://www.sjgs.com/history.html
4. Chronology of Oil – Canada http://www.geohelp.ab.ca/history.html
5. Chronology of Oil – World http://www.geohelp.ab.ca/world.html
6. Petroleum History Society – Canada http://www.petroleumhistory.ca/
7. History of American Oil Industry http://www.oilhistory.com/
8. Index to Oil History Sites http://www.little-mountain.com/oilwell/
9. Canadian Inventors http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa090100a.htm
10. Canadian Petroleum Hall of Fame http://www.canadianpetroleumhalloffame.ca/
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E. R. (Ross) Crain, P.Eng. is a Consulting Petrophysicist and a Professional Engineer with over 35 years of experience in reservoir description, petrophysical analysis, and management. He has been a specialist in the integration of well log analysis and petrophysics with geophysical, geological, engineering, and simulation phases of oil and gas exploration and exploitation, with widespread Canadian and Overseas experience.
His textbook, “Crain’s Petrophysical Handbook on CD-ROM” is widely used as a reference to practical log analysis. Mr. Crain is an Honourary Member and Past President of the Canadian Well Logging Society (CWLS), a Member of Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts (SPWLA), and a Registered Professional Engineer with Alberta Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists (APEGGA).
