Show dohe doheny ny talks on petroleum in mexico lessons to be learned from the work of petroleum pioneers in mexico was the subject of an interesting paper by edward L doheny read before the recent convention of the american petroleum institute at chicago says the mining and oil bulletin for april in company with C A canfield and A P maginnis mag innis mr doheny made his first trip to mexico in may 1900 after a two thousand mile journey by rail the party reached cardenas in the eastern part of san luis potosi while greatly interested in the scenic wonders of the trip the travelers were not enthused with t the he prospect of developing oil in this far away and strange region where the discovery of oil would probably mean only y the beginning b of obstacles that must be surmounted before a market could be developed that would justify exploration when they arrived at a point thirty five miles west of tampico the travelers were conducted by a guide to two oil exudes one about three miles north odthe mexican central railway station chijol chicol and the other about five miles south of auza in the latter place said mr doheny we found a small conical shaped hill known as cerro de la pez fez where bubbled a spring of oil the sight of which caused us to forget all about the dreaded climate its hot humid atmosphere its apparently incessant rains those jungle pests the pino lillas and garrapatas garra patas wood ticks the dense forest jungle which seems to grow up as fast as cut down its great distance from any center that we could call civilization and still greater distance from a source of supplies of oil well materials all were forgotten in the joy of discovery with which we contemplated this little hill from whose base flowed oil in various directions we felt that we knew and we did know that we were in an oil region which would produce in unlimited quantities that for which the world had the greatest need oil fuel cerro de la pez hill of tar answering the question as to what was the basis for their belief that oil in commercial quantities existed in this region mr doheny said the cerro de la pez as well as chijol chicol with their active exudes the gas as continually coming 6 to the surface the hill of material different from that of the surrounding country the evidence of oil oozing along the contact between the formations of which the hill was composed and the sedimentary formations which abutted against it the exposures of the strata along the railroad cuts from the mountains down to the vicinity of these exudes giving 6 evidence of the nature of the rock formation for many thousands of feet in depth all led us to the inevitable conclusion that this oil found its home or origin either in the upper surface of the tamasopo Tama sopo limestone or in the more thinly stratified limes and overlying it and that these exudes merely marked the places where the choy formation or mendez were fractured and dislocated so as to permit the flow of the oil to the sura fcc ce oil bein being b a liquid is subject to the same influences whether the ori original inal oil containing rocks are strata of porous sand formations as in california or the honeycombed thickly bedded lime stones as in mexico the pressure of the superincumbent strata capillary attraction gas pressure and hydrostatic pressure all tend to draw or force the oil from its original receptacle upward to the surface along every line of least resistance resi stence and in mexico the evidence was convincing that the conditions were favorable for the storing of immense quantities of oil mexican oil lands privately owned at this time there were no known public lands in this part of mexico all of the vacant unclaimed lands were called terreros ter renos boldios bal dios or basantes ba cantes and were merel merely y unclaimed formerly private lands the titles to which may have reverted to the government our purchases were all made of privately owned lands our dealings were all with the owners or the administrators of the lands I 1 mention this because there is an impression abroad that the foreign oil land holdings in mexico were acquired through concessions from the government concessions of doubtful validity such an impression is absolutely ab erroneous as all the lands of all of the american companies so far as I 1 know were the private property of individuals or of estates or ones early maps were guides to oil fields reports on the oil exudes of mexico were mada made ii in hw by W A goodyear then assistant state geologist of california and early maps of the coastal plain were among mr Do henys best guides to the various oil districts to the oil prospector the names appearing on many of thess thes old maps were especially inte interesting resting and instructive el Chapa pote el Chapa cerro ie la pez and ojo de brea all indicate the presence of tar or pitch and are names given to places in the vicinity of which oil exudes exist excursions and explorations purchase of the ranch upon which th exude aude was found and of af them the adjoining ranch was followed follow ed by explorations of the country in all directions direction s in the course of which the seepages see pages that have since developed into the panuco and topila jopila oil districts were visited these excursions and explorations result eld in the acquisition of acres before any well was completed and later purchases brought the total up to acres which are stilt still held previous attempts to locate oil unsuccessful attempts had been made previously to discover oil in mexico but no drilling had ever been done north of cerro viejo about eighty five miles south of tampico As the production of petroleum was not being attempted on a commercial scale the mexican law allowed free transportation of all necessary supplies and except for the stamp tax freedom from taxation for ten years unfriendly attitude to oil prospectors because of these previous unsuccessful efforts dating back to 1876 the attempt to develop oil received little encouragement coura b gement from mexican officials or p professional professional men with the exception of the president of the republic porfirio diaz and his minester of fomento the mexican geological institute nominated two geologists to report on the oil prospect of the Hua region and especially on the cerro de la pez district although though 11 the report of prof ezequiel one of the b geologists was favorable the institute supported the adverse report of prof notwithstanding standing this adverse report develop development work proceeded Locati locating tig the first well our first well was located in march in the ebano field a derrick built and the tools commenced to drop on the first of may 1901 on the fourteenth day of may we were wakened aw early one morning by the driller who told us that at the depth of feet oil had come into the hole in such quantity as to lift the tools off the bottom and interrupt drillen drilling 6 he immediately put out the fire under the boiler and shut down to await daylight and our inspection during 11 its twenty years life the ebano field in which the original well was located has produced nearly thirty million barrels of oil it produced over ten million barrels in the first ten years and has been producing 6 at the rate of five thousand barrels per day since 1911 stimulated by this success mr doheny and his associates decided in 1906 to go further afield and acquire new properties after two months of investigation and negotiation they became the owners of properties in what is now known as the cas casiano iano basin millions spent before oil produced in the development of the casiano property mr doheny took wh iwas awas probably the most farsighted action in his whole career with absolute confidence in his own judgment he risked the expenditure of millions of dollars on tanks pipe lines and equipment while the wells were being drilled and before any oil had been produced but for this foresight millions of barrels of oil would have been wasted as when the well came in it was found impossible completely to close it in describing these preparations mr doheny said As we knew when we first saw ebano that we were going to develop oil there in commercial quantities so now we had faith in the productivity of this new hew district we ordered seventy miles of eight inch pipeline to be built to this distant point where no oil had ever been developed and eight large oil pumps and the boilers for the pump stations of the future we ordered pipelines and pump stations the tanks to accommodate the oil at the pump stations the terminal storage stora e the derricks drilling machinery and oil well supplies at the same time we bought a right of way from casiano to tampico except for a short distance we constructed ted the pipeline in record time we put in the pump stations complete with pumps and boilers and the necessary receiving tanks meanwhile we were drilling the wells for the oil to put through the pipelines our calculations on making the pipeline pay were based on a minimum production of barrels per day which we were confident we could realize the development of one enormous well which could not be shut in made it necessary however to build millions of barrels of steel and cement storage to accommodate the flow of the well until such time as a sufficient market could be found one hundred and five barrel storage tanks were erected in record time also a barrel reservoir markets were slow to absorb the enormous product of these new wells one of which the casiano no 7 was then predicting pro ducting about barrels of oil per day and has since yielded over eighty million barrels notwithstanding adverse reports on the value of these productive properties a loan was successfully negotiated for with which oil tankers were purchased and a market developed in the new england states where the sales have since grown to over forty million barrels per annum looking ahead up to the present the oil exudes found in numerous places along 6 the mexican coast have been the only guide for the development of oil such a guide has been successful and it will continue to be so until the last of the li areas showing oil exudes is developed and exhausted in this line of thought we must distinguish between the exude which denotes the existence of underground oil pools and those indications sucu such as impregnated surface rocks to be seen along Z the foothills of the sierra madre mountains which indicate merely the dissipation of the oil theretofore existing A close examination of the ancient maps and the exploration of the surface of this gulf coastal plain show that of the total area a very small percentage is is marked with oil seepages see pages the total amount of such areas being small the oil pools which they indicate will be exhausted long before the discovery of the large number of oil pools which exist under tinder the lands which have no exudes but which may be directly connected with the places where exudes exist Otio quoting ting the best posted and most reliable of the mexican geologists if the oil pools of the mexican coastal plain exist only where oil seepages see pages exist then the life of oil production in mexico is comparatively short and could be estimated at from one to possibly two more decades with a continuously declining production within the next ifer years it is a fact that the existence of an oil exude in this region invariably means the close proximity of a volcanic plug or dike whether visible or hidden underground practically all of these exudes are located near such basal basaltic fic plugs or dikes and a great many of them are found at the contact between the volcanic and sedimentary rocks as m in the case of cerro de la pez el chapote chapone Cha pote cerro azul los borrachos Borra chos gil de solis and Chapa in these cases the sedimentary rocks are always of shale sometimes however overlaid by marls and sandstones the necessity for the existence coexistence co of these basaltic cores and oil exudes along the coastal plain is resultant from the following facts first very thick bedding of impervious which covers and hermetically seals the underground oil pools thus preventing their waste and second the absence of important faults in the geological features the oil which makes its way to the surface generally follows the contact between the basaltic rocks and the sed along which contact it finds a place of least resistance occasionally these exudes follow up through crevices produced by old volcanic explosions above a mass of underground basalt which has not reached the surface in any case the oil coming up to the surface of the ground does so against great resistance resi stence the development in many places notably at ebano demonstrates demon states that the volcanic phenomena which resulted in these basaltic dikes and plugs have contributed in no uncertain measure to the existence of the areas of dislocation and cavities which afterwards became filled with oil through a very slow process of accumulation the larger these basaltic dikes and plugs and the more frequently they are encountered the larger will be the number and the size of the oil pools in their proximity it is ig not meant to contend that where there are no basaltic hills or ridges there no oil will be found because it is admitted that the volcanic phenomena are not indispensable to the formation of oil pools in mexico and furthermore the number of underground masses of volcanic rock which make no appearance on the surface except possibly by a fracture is very great this has been demonstrated by the bodies of volcanic sand as well as rock drilled into at chirol chijol and in other places where no exposures of volcanic ic rock appear ori orf the surface it is altogether likely that where there is a total absence of basaltic rocks in a given area there will be oil pools of more moderate size than those heretofore developed it is also quite likely that in these numerous hidden oil pools rests the more remote future of the oil production in mexico there are two questions of vital interest in this connection first do the oil seepages see pages sparsely scattered over an immense area indicate with certainty the existence of pools of oil in the vicinity beneath the experiences of the last twenty years give the answerl answer to this question decidedly in the affirmative second are there substantial pools of oil in places far away from the vicinity of these exudes and also far away from any form of volcanic action or volcanic rock masses to this we venture the reply yes discovery of pools how to look for and discover the much desired oil pools first where oil exudes indicate the existence exis tense of oil pools beneath a careful study should be made of their nature and occurrences so as to determine if possible whether the oil exudes are part of a series of exudes which indicate a line of fracture or dislocation in any particular direction often careful search will reveal that the exudes continue along a definite line and that drillings made at right angles with the extension of this line will determine where the pool is located and its width after which drillings along the line of exudes will reveal the extent of the pool or pools sometimes a study of the stati graphy of the rocks which appear on the surface in the vicinity will indicate the position with relation to the exudes that the uplifted or domal structure bears it is well know that in mexico as ill ift california and other places the topography of the surface is not a safe guide as to the faulting of the rocks beneath the bed of an arroyo or a valley i is s often located along the axis of an the rocks dipping both ways and the valley becoming the natural site for wells to be located to penetrate the top of the fold and get the gas pressure and oil production if any there be underneath it must be borne in mind in making |