Monday, Nov 25, 2013 The largest oilfield in the USA south of Canada is said to be the East Texas Oilfield. (The largest oilfield in the USA is Prudho Bay in Alaska).Since I began my research on oil in 2003 my mental image of the East Texas Oilfield has been the graph of production from that field that Jean Laherrère used to present and update every year. The latest version is updated for 2012. We see that production reached a maximum in 1933 and then declined until the 1960s when they began to pump water into the field to raise its pressure. Production then increased for some years before beginning to decline once again. Since the middle of the 1990s production has crashed. Up until 2012 a total of 31,241 wells had been drilled into the field and in its heyday a maximum of 26,000 were producing oil. For 2006 there is information available that a little over 4,000 wells were in production and now, presumably, fewer still. The cumulative production during 82 years is given as 5.4 billion barrels. Jean tells that it is difficult to get hold of today’s production data from the East Texas Oilfield. The most recent data point from 2009 is from the Energy Information Administration that presented data for the USA’s one hundred largest oilfields. If the field produces some millions of barrels per year this is only a drop in the bucket compared with the 6,773 million barrels of oil that the USA consumed in 2012 (BP Statistical Review of World Energy). Today’s production from the old wells in the East Texas Oilfield can be regarded as “museum activity”. It is a tourist attraction to see the old pumps standing there nodding up and down.
During the weekend (November 16-17) we visited the East Texas Oilfield and Jean’s graph has now been complemented with a number of images of the reality. On Saturday after lunch we arrived in Kilgore and immediately visited the museum there describing the history of the East Texas Oilfield. The field was discovered on 5 October 1930 and the museum has many interesting photographs from that time. After the discovery of oil, in only a few days the population of Kilgore increased tenfold making it a so-called “boom town”. At the start they did not realize that East Texas was a giant oilfield but when they made widely spread finds at the same depth their understanding of the field began to clarify. According to Jean far too many wells were drilled into the field and when one views the field from above ground (see photo) one can see that he is correct. I will not repeat the information on the East Texas Oilfield that can be found at the museum website but will direct you to it instead if you are interested: . (East Texas Oil Museum/).
The main aim of our visit was to film suitable environments for the documentary film I am making on oil in Texas. We were very successful with that. Here I will show only some of the images that I captured during the visit. First is the image of a map showing the extent of the oilfield. We can see that the USA’s second largest oilfield is nevertheless quite small in extent. Its average width is 8 km (5 miles) and its length is 72 km (45 miles). In comparison I can state that the world’s largest crude oil field, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, is 26 km wide and 280 km long. Note that Austin and Dallas can be found on the map’s western side. During WWII it was oil from the East Texas Oilfield that supplied the Allied armies with fuel. The oil was initially transported by boat but the German U-boats forced the USA to build a pipeline, the Big Inch, from Longview in the field’s northeast corner to New York and Pennsylvania. From the historical images shown in the Museum I have chosen a street image from Kilgore from the 1930s.
As a memorial to the oil era in Kilgore they have moved a number of drilling towers so that they line the street near the railway. Every tower now has a Star of Texas at its top and in a number of days these will be illuminated for the Christmas season.
