Down the years, petroleum engineers have come up with some brilliant ideas. I got a chance to browse through OGJ archives recently and found thick pay zones of ingenuity.
Some inventions were responses to operating problems. For instance, a collapsible 15,000-gal water tank made of rubberized fabric. It looked like a giant haggis with an umbilical cord.
This portable tank was used where water had to be hauled a long way and where storage was a problem. It was particularly useful for wildcat drilling (OGJ, Apr. 21, 1958, p. 170).
Then there was a portable furnace for drilling contractors. This enabled shrink-fit tool joints to be fitted quickly in the field, without hauling the pipe to a central workshop (OGJ, Jan. 10, 1955, p. 99).
Futuristic
Some ideas were futuristic when they were conceived, and still are.
E.W. Jenkins Jr. of Shell Oil Co. had visions of a push-button world almost 40 years ago (OGJ, Mar. 17, 1958, p. 89).
Jenkins said refiners, through startling communications advances, may one day remotely control production of fields hundreds of miles away. Crude production could be set to maintain desired refinery runs, he said.
One old story stated that, if current interest is maintained, it is likely that fuel cells will serve as power sources in special applications within the next 5 years (OGJ, Nov. 27, 1961, p. 92).
The headline was: "Fuel cells as power sources may be closer than you think." You could run the story with a 1997 date, with only a couple of minor detail changes, and it would stand today.
Some inventions look wild in retrospect. Long before nuclear power became a taboo subject, Esso Standard Oil Co. was considering building the world's first nuclear-powered tanker (OGJ, Mar. 2, 1959, p. 63).
My favorite is a fuel train developed by the U.S. Army for delivering to remote areas over sand, mud, swamps, boulders, hills, ice, and deep snow (OGJ, Jan. 20, 1958, p. 90).
The train consisted of 10 enormous tires, each 5 ft high and with capacity to hold 500 gal of fuel. The tires were mounted in pairs on axles and towed by a tractor.
I thought the army might later regret this brain wave. Slow moving bags of gasoline would surely be a tempting target for any guerrilla. But a colleague said he thought the fuel trains are in use today.
Apocalyptic
The most radical inspiration came to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, El Paso Natural Gas Co., and the U.S. Bureau of Mines.
They studied feasibility of setting off a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb just below a thick gas bearing sand in an "unproducible" gas field.
The idea was that the blast would create a borehole in the pay zone of 100 ft or more in diameter, with fractures extending well beyond this range (OGJ, May 10, 1965, p. 97).
Thankfully, the oil and gas industry has discovered other ways, less exciting but also less potentially apocalyptic, of improving reservoir permeability.
In hindsight, it is easy to see flaws in big ideas. For every success there will inevitably be failures. But without such perpetual weeding, industry would not progress.
Copyright 1997 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
