From the Editor - September 2015

From the Editor - September 2015

Welcome to the first of my From the Editor columns. It’s about a piece of oil industry history which I hope you’ll find inspiring, as it has been for me. Inspiration is one of the themes I have decided to use for my allotted ten columns for the 2015-16 HGS Bulletin. Inspiration is something we all seek, both in our personal and professional lives. It is a primary force that ignites and sustains our passions, and I think it’s worth remembering that one of the definitions of inspiration is “the act of breathing-in.”

The Greatest Oil Well in History is a story mostly forgotten, as it lay hidden for some 70 years in the archives of my first employer Amoco Production Company. During the 1990’s, when I worked on a series of joint technical projects involving Amoco, Pemex and the Instituto Mexicano del Petróleo, my friend and former Amoco colleague Josh Rosenfeld found a dog-eared copy of a 1922 Pan American Petroleum & Transport Company (predecessor to Amoco) publication entitled Mexican Petroleum in a dusty corner of the company library in Houston. He decided to make a nice little reprint of a portion of it to distribute at the Amoco booth at a number of Mexican industry events. The subject of Josh’s excerpt from the book was Cerro Azul #4, drilled in the Tampico-Misantla Basin of Mexico during late 1915/early 1916 by Pan American. By the way, the President of Pan American Petroleum & Transport was legendary California oilman Edward L. Doheny, whose life story inspired UptonSinclair’s 1920’s novel Oil! and much later the 2007 Oscar-winning movie There Will Be Blood.

Cerro Azul #4 was drilled with a cable-tool rig into the karstified Albian-Cenomanian rudist reef complex of the El Abra Formation, in the northwest part of an elliptical belt of oil discoveries that came to be known as the Faja de Oro (or, as it’s inaccurately expressed in English, the “Golden Lane”). The well blew out on 10 February 1916 at a depth of around 1,700 feet, and wasn’t brought under control until nine days later. During that nine-day period, the gusher steadily grew to around 700 feet in height, and because of high winds caused by a cold front uncommon this far south in the Gulf, much of the oil was blown up to two miles from the wellsite. Apart from the drilling tools and steel cable being shot far from the wellbore by the gusher, it was reported that stalactites and stalagmites associated with the cavernous porosity of the El Abra reservoir were ejected at high velocity along with the oil.

Because of the great quantity of oil flowing uncontrolled from the well, an attempt was made to collect as much of it as possible by digging a series of trenches away from the wellsite leading into surface pits. The volume of oil could then be calculated by measuring its flow rate through the trenches along with the width and depth of the flow. By this means, Cerro Azul #4 was estimated to have reached a flow rate of 260,858 barrels per day (not taking into account the oil blown away from the gusher in the wind) on the day before it started to be brought under control. This (minimum) estimate far outstrips the maximum recorded flow rate of any other individual well, anywhere in the world.
It should be emphasized that, although Doheny led the company that drilled Cerro Azul #4, the great discovery would not have been made were it not for the informed optimism, persistence, and belief in the oil potential of the Tampico region by Pan American’s Chief Geologist Ezequiel Ordoñez, now regarded as one of the giants of the Mexican petroleum industry.
There are many other fascinating details of the Cerro Azul #4 story, such as the fact that it took only nine days for the wellsite crew to bring the blowout under control, despite having to forge on-site some of the components of the valve assembly. Perhaps most amazing of all is that Cerro Azul #4 is still producing today, or at least as of the early 2000’s when the last accompanying photo was taken. The entire story of the birth of this world champion can be found in the aforementioned 1922 publication Mexican Petroleum, available on the web at Google Books.

So some questions naturally arise: was Cerro Azul #4 the global extreme outlier, never to be repeated? Or could there be any analogues out there still waiting to be discovered, perhaps by you and your team? Without the gusher, of course…