On the first morning of our 2010 ILN Regional Meeting of the Americas in Houston, we had a fascinating presentation from Beirne Maynard & Parsons' Brit Brown and Ben Escobar on "Deepwater Gulf Oil Spill - An Energy Update."
A Little Oil History...
Brown started by saying that it used to be incredibly easy to find oil in Texas - it would just bubble up. The first oil well was actually the Drake Oil Well in Pennsylvania and it produced about 400 barrels a day. About the same time, they figured out how to distill oil into kerosene, and that became the cheap alternative to well oil.
The well oil industry started to boom, and the first gusher was Spindletop, which started on January 10, 1901. Brown said that it was a phenomenal gusher by any standards, taking nine days to control. It only went to 1,100 feet, which is a relatively shallow well by today's standards.
Spindletop was outside of Beaumont, Texas and produced, during the gushing stage, about 100,000 barrels of oil a day. To compare, Brown said that the government estimate for the Macondo well was a high of 63,000 barrels a day when it was gushing into the Gulf....
...Where Are We Now?
Brown said that the greatest oil production (based on barrels of proven reserves) is in the Middle East, followed by South and Central America, Europe and Eurasia. The US proven reserves is right about 28 billion barrels, which is not a lot when you consider that the US consumes about seven billion barrels of oil each year and was once the largest producers of oil in the world.....
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