[LINK] "The Lakeview Gusher"

[rfmcdonald]

pauldrye writes about the Lakeview Gusher, a 1911 oil gusher produced by lax drilling procedures that's estimated to have been even bigger than the ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. How much bigger?

Eventually the oil company gave up trying to cap the gusher and settled on a second strategy, which had been used elsewhere but not to the same extent. Just like when a river floods, workers were hired to build an embankment of timbers and sandbags around the gusher. The local terrain required them to build a wall 150 feet wide at one end of a nearby gully and 250 feet at the other. It was, in places, 75 feet above the edge of the folds in the ground. In total, it could hold 16 million barrels of oil (or, in more commonly understood units, 672 million gallons, or 2.5 billion liters). Though the oil lake never quite reached the rim, at times the reservoir was up to 30 meters deep. The well was in the middle of this, so workers had to paddle out to it in small boats. This undoubtedly would have broken any number of health-and-safety regulations, if California had had any in 1910.

A “semi-cap” was eventually placed over the wellhead to at least keep the plume of oil in its gully and stop it from spewing all over the landscape. Some idea of the power of the gusher can be obtained by understanding that this new box hovered about ten feet in the air despite weighing several tons. To keep it from being propelled off into the middle distance somewhere, it had to be anchored to the ground by steel guy wires, which were in constant tension as the oil and muck roared and played against the underside of what was essentially a giant timber raft. Eventually the growing weight of the oil lake (and its growing depth) above the wellhead brought the tip of the gusher down to man height.

Most large gushers give out after a short while; the famous Lucas Gusher in Texas’ Spindletop oil field was as voluminous as Lakeview One, but dwindled away to much lower levels within a few months. Lakeview kept going at roughly the same volume, diminishing slowly to 60,000 barrels per day, until September 10th, 1911 when the bottom of the hole it had been eroding collapsed and filled in the well (some sources say September 9th). For 544 days the Lakeview Gusher had produced a significant fraction of all the world’s oil—to the point that, even with something like 40% of its production being wasted by being absorbed into the soil or flying all around the landscape at the top of an uncapped plume, what Union Oil could recover drove down the world oil price by 70% (from roughly $1 per barrel to 30¢ per barrel).