CHAPTER 1 3
GOING FORWARD
In the spring of 2014, what's old was what's new over much of the state. In South Texas, EOG was reworking the legendary King Ranch field, where Humble Oil first began production in 1939. The Houston-based company took over operation of the lease from Exxon Mobil, Humble's successor corporation. The sprawling ranch has 4,000 wells, with EOG planning 24 new wells for 2014.
Even the historic 1901 Spindletop field appeared on the verge of renewal. E&B Natural Resources of Bakersfield, California, and several other companies were drilling in the spring of 2014 near the old salt dome field that launched the modern oil era in Texas.
While both the ecological and geological impact of the 21st century Texas oil boom and how long it will last continues to be debated, no ambiguity can be found in the statistics.
"By leaps and bounds," declared Kathleen Hartnett-White and Vance Ginn in an assessment written for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, "Texas oil increasingly dominates the phenomenal rise in domestic oil production. After 28 years of continuing decline, Texas has increased its oil production by a remarkable 141 percent since January 2009, a rate of growth coincident with an astonishing 155 percent increase in the inflation-adjusted West Texas Intermediate oil price.
"For this unparalleled success in the energy sector," she continued, "we should thank risk-taking men and women in the Texas oil business for setting the U.S. well on its way to becoming the world's energy superpower and for renewing faith in the prodigious vigor of free enterprise."
INNOVATION
Booms have come and gone, but the Texas oil industry has seen one constant: Innovation. If necessity is the mother of invention, in Texas, a willingness to be unconventional is the proud papa.
From the rotary drill bit to blowout preventers, from mud to pump jacks, from magnetometers to seismic technology and from computer programs to slick-water fracturing and horizontal drilling, Texas has long been at the forefront of oil field technology.
Patillo Higgins, the determined character who kept trying for oil until he got it at Spindletop, is a good example of this mindset, which, with ample help from newspapers, magazines and Hollywood, became the stereotypical view of the Texas oilman-a gutsy gambler willing to bet all his chips on a hunch. Other wildcatters, just as daring, sought to make their own luck through technology.
Another early innovator was Curt Hamill, Antony Lucas' driller. Hamill and his two brothers, who had cut their teeth in the Corsicana oil field, developed the use of mud in drilling. The problem for which Hamill would develop a unique solution was sand. The coastal plain lay over several hundred feet of sand. That material not being the most stable of geologic features, holes drilled into sand often collapsed. To deal with that issue, Hamill pumped mud down the hole instead of the water normally used to flush the drill cuttings. Mud proved not only more effective at getting the cuttings out, it stuck to the sand and tended to keep the holes from caving in. Mud has been a mainstay in the oil patch ever since.
Man's ability to coerce oil and gas from beneath the surface of the Lone Star State has steadily improved with each decade.
On January 3, 1926, for example, a wildcat came in on the Nash Ranch in Fort Bend County. The well had been drilled on the flank of a salt dome located through the geophysical work of Everett DeGolyer. The pool gained the distinction of being the first anywhere in the world discovered solely through geophysical methodology.
