Spring Pole History

Offshore drilling has become an essential part of today’s oil production and demand for energy. With the growth of population comes the increasing demand for oil. The oil industry today, is one of the most used providers of energy. Today in the 20th century the majority of the population in America has a car and cars needs gas to run. The oil reserves in the earth that are easily accessible via land are starting to run dry and are becoming harder to find. This is why we have begun to see more and more offshore oil drills. Although there are benefits of offshore drilling such as profit, lower gas prices, and becoming less dependent on foreign oil. There are also many drawbacks in which if something were to go wrong, the mistake would be catastrophic impacting the environment, the nature, and have trickling effects all around the world.

Once the well reaches the right depth, it turns right or left and becomes horizontal. This is called the kick off point. The horizontal section can span anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 feet. The drill is removed but the surrounding steel casing remains. These steel casings are meant to protect the groundwater and the surrounding area from any potential leakage during the fracking process. Down at the horizontal section of the well, little holes are punctured through the steel in thousands of spots. Then, a water solution is pumped at a extremely high pressure down the well. This causes tons of cracks and fissures in the rock. Additives and sand in the water mixture hold the cracks open, allowing oil to escape and be brought up to the surface.

Texas’ history with oil starts much earlier than the 1901 Spindletop gusher. As early as 1543, there were reports of natural oil seeps along the coast of Texas which was used as both medical treatments and caulking for boats by Spanish explorers (Wooster). In 1866, the first of Texas’ oil producing wells was drilled in Nacogdoches County, however the supply and profit was not high enough to justify further development. In 1895 in Corsicana, Texas there was a minor oil find that led to the creation of Texas’ first oil refinery in Nacogdoches, Texas. Another large oil find is the East Texas Oil Field which spans 140,000 acres and is considered to be the largest oil field in the United States (excluding Alaska); this oil field has produced over 5.2 billion barrels from its 30,340 historic and active oil wells (Smith).

Offshore drilling is defined as” The operation of oil wells on the continental shelf, sometimes in water hundreds of feet deep” according to dictionary.com. This method of drilling is a very common form, being used throughout different locations offshore everywhere in the world, the first being in 1897 according to howstuffworks.com. The locations of oil are found by two main methods. The first one is by finding magnetic occurrences that are in natural in the ground. If readings found a steady amount of magnetism over a general area then suddenly a large decline, they could have found the location of an oil deposit. But to ensure that is in fact a trap, the second method called sparking. “sparking is sending shock waves down through the water and into the ocean floor.” This allows ships above to be able to read the ground below and see at different locations where

The Giliasso was constructed by fastening together the twin steel hulls of two standard transportation barges, leaving space in the middle for drilling. Towed to location, the lower compartments of the hulls were flooded, sinking the barge to the bottom. The upper compartments remained above the water and provided a platform to hold the drilling structures, equipment, and power plant. The Giliasso demonstrated its drilling capabilities immediately in Lake Pelto, reducing by 20 percent the time spent on a well not related to drilling or completing, and afterward proved its ease of mobility in being towed to Lake Barré By 1935, Texaco had built and deployed a fleet of seven such barges along the Louisiana coast, each drilling 6 wells per year. By 1938, the industry had drilled 3,300 wells in parishes adjacent to the Gulf, 700 of which were surrounded by water. The most active areas were in the Lake Barré, Terrebonne Bay, Pelto Bay, and Timbalier Bay areas of Terrebonne

Cantilena Springs, now known as Edward Vincent Jr Park, is located on the corner of Warren Lane and Park Avenue in the city of Inglewood. The park being two minutes across the street from my apartment, is one of the major reasons why I choose this historical site.

extending the cracks created by the perforating gun. The sand keeps the fractures open once

Recently, oil companies have increased their search for oil in water deeper than 1,500 feet, which is classified as "deep water." While that is where the companies hope to find the largest untapped oil reserves, seeking out and extracting oil there presents unique challenges. For one thing, platforms in deep water cannot sit on legs connected to the sea floor the way they can in shallower areas, so other methods must be used to protect them from strong currents.

An offshore platform which is also known as oil rig is utilised on exploration oil and gas from under seabed and processing. It consists of facilities for drilling, storing and process as well as extracting product. The wells are drilled and platforms are constructed for the operation. An oil rig is constructed to draw out oil or gas from the seafloor.

The issue of whether offshore oil drilling is a safe operation or not has been arguing for a long time in the United States. ( SPE International, N.D.) Drilling on water started in early 1930s in Louisiana by shallow-draft barges. Nevertheless, the first oil well on water was drilled in 9th of September, 1947 by Kerr-McGee’s unit Tender Assist Drilling (TAD) in the Gulf of Mexico (SPE International, N.D.). A year after year, oil companies used more and more sophisticated equipment to drill on water, but the number of spilled accidents has been rising since 1964 (Ivanovich, and Hays, 2008). After all, while

Oil spills usually occur as temporary accidents, while pollution from trucks happens every day. Therefore, offshore drilling does not contaminate the water as badly as the United States thinks.

Since the past few decades, owning a car has become a necessity in order to commute from one place to another. However, cars do not work automatically, they require fuel. Since the past decade, the petroleum industry has become one of the leading industries impacting the nation’s economy. Oil has become an essential commodity as it is utilized in transportation vehicles, serves as a raw material for manufacturing plastics, and is utilized in homes for cooking. America’s economy is greatly dependent on petroleum as it is the “black gold” of the nation. The considerable significance of oil has led to the drilling of it, which is not only limited to land, but also the oceans. Offshore drilling is a method in which petroleum is extracted from underneath the seabed. It is one of the significant technological advancements in the past few decades. However, the ones who are involved in the process of offshore oil production are humans, and humans tend to make mistakes. In 1969, due to a human error, an oil spill occurred and natural gas, oil, and mud shot up the well and oozed into the ocean (“Offshore Drilling”). The oil spilled led to an environmental disaster which killed thousands of marine animals and distorted the environment. In order to prevent the same error, the government passed a moratorium in 1981, banning more than 85 percent of the country’s oil drilling sites (“Offshore Drilling”). The moratorium restricted the United States to mass-produce its natural resource.

The accident, which occurred on board of the seaward platform Piper Alpha in July 1988, took lives of 167 people and cost billions of dollars damage of property. The Piper Alpha is placed in the North Sea, around 193 km northeast of Aberdeen. The field was discovered in January 1973 and the same year construction of platform took place. The depth of it was up to 140 m, and at the time the development and installation of the Piper Alpha platform give tongue to a major step in both the development of the UK offshore resources and technology. The basic design of the topsides was establish on those used in the Gulf of Mexico. The platform production of oil started in December 1976 when the first two wells

Drilling in the United States of America dates as far back as 1859, when the Drake well was first drilled in Pennsylvania. At the time one of the most common problems well operators encountered, was their inability to produce oil independently of water. Since there was no casing/casing design, this problem became more prevalent. The water usually came from the same formation bearing the oil, but more commonly it came from an upper sand formation. The implementation of cementing and proper casing design did not start until 1903, when the first cement slurry was used to “shut off downhole water just above an oil sand in the Lompoc fields in California”(Doherty 1,1960) by mixing and dumping 50 sacks of fine Portland cement by means of the bailer method. After a 28-day waiting period, the cement was then drilled out. It was introduced by Frank .F Hill of Union Company. In 1910, the dump bailer and tubing method was replaced by the two-plug cementing method also known as the Perkins method, which was introduced in California by Almond .A Perkins, and it quickly became the foundation for modern oil well cementing. The cement plugs, were made out of

This machine was built to counteract the need of huge digging job around the field. It operates with the other earth moving machines such as dump truck, loader, etc