Hobbies And Interests
Manual Boring
According to Dan Yeargin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil "The Prize," the first oil drills were actually salt borers, used to punch through salt domes under the ground. Using this technique, a large, heavy rod was manually lifted by laborers high over a shaft, then released. The rod would fall into the shaft, slamming against the rock below and eventually shattering it. Workers then removed the rock manually. Eventually, this rod would break through the rock covering the oil reservoir and oil workers could extract the liquid oil through buckets or basic water hand pumps.
Automatic Boring
As more people began drilling for oil and oil drilling became bigger business, oil drillers made several improvements to the manual salt boring. Early oil derricks rising several stories over the shaft provided more force for the bore, speeding the process. Larger oil drilling companies also added steam engines to the boring process, removing the need for manual labor to continually hoist the bore to the top of the shaft. While small outfits searching for oil continued to use manual boring well into the 20th century, large oil prospecting companies shifted to automatic boring in order to speed the process.
Rotary Drilling
Rotary drilling, developed around the turn of the 20th century in Europe, represented a major shift in oil drilling technology. Rotary drills operate as a massive screwdriver, turned from the ground level by a steam engine. The drill bit of the rotary drill drives into the rock at the bottom of the shaft, breaking it into little pieces. These pieces can then be transported up through the hollow tube of the drill. This constant drilling allowed for much faster and much less labor-intensive work. While technology has improved dramatically since the early 1900s, rotary drilling is still the preferred way of drilling for oil in land-based oil wells.
Offshore Drilling
While the technical processes that allow oil companies to drill for oil underneath the deep ocean floor are relatively new, the techniques and technology for lake --based and shallow-water offshore drilling have been used since the late 1800s. Oil drillers first successfully used offshore drilling techniques off the coast of California. Offshore rigs are relatively similar to land-based drilling setups, with a rotary drill attached to a derrick. In early years, the derrick was simply anchored to the lake floor with legs.