Tales from the Oil Field of Days Gone By: Part 2 - Oil Field Lore and Superstitions

Tales from the Oil Field of Bygone Days: Part 2 – Oil Field Lore and Superstitions

Before the advent of resource plays and horizontal drilling, there were dry holes. Dry holes meant basically that all the money invested in drilling the well was toast, gone. In some plays it was usually better to take a dry hole sooner due to determination after drilling and cut your losses rather than try and complete the well and see what you got and get a ‘double dry hole’. In any case, the uncertainty associated with exploring for hydrocarbons lends itself well to superstition and lore. There are also a lot of things that can go wrong with the rig and equipment so some wells are ‘technical successes’ but not economic successes. Sometimes it was just “poke and hope.” 

I had heard a tale that in Pakistan the local Muslims would sacrifice a goat at the rig to give luck to the well! There are other options less gory and cruel to juju your well. One is so-called “water-witching” applied to oil or gas wells. This is also known as dowsing. A plumber once showed me how to do it with a specially bent coat hanger. The company that drilled the water well on my property had a guy witch it. Apparently, the Amish have both water and oil/gas witchers.

Once on a well in north central Ohio an old boy not quite right in the head had first moved the flags for the seismic line, then later claimed that the hole would be dry – that they needed to move the well stake (which he did but it was moved back). He said there was, and I quote, a “bastard vein” over there where he put the well stake. The well targeted the Knox Unconformity – the Trempeleau formation, although if the buried hill, or remnant, was big enough one could get some of the Rose Run formation. The old boy said there was a “bastard vein in that Red Rose formation.” The well as drilled ended up being a dry hole so maybe the old boy was right!

On another well drilled by a small family operating company I was informed that the best place to drill was where lightning struck a walnut tree and where there was a sandstone outcrop. Both, apparently were present near this location. It ended up being a fairly decent well as I later checked from the production record of it.

One taboo is to never bring a cherry pie to the drilling rig. I am not sure the origin of that one but landowners and neighbors do sometimes bring food to workers, including pies so I would guess many have been brought unaware of the legend.

Well that is about all I know from personal experience about oil field lore.

Apparently, there is quite a bit of legend, myth, and tale around a turn of the (20^th) century explorer named Gib Morgan. Here there are even “archetypes” of oil field figures examined: geologist, promoter, shooter (stimulating wells with explosives used to be common – nitroglycerin typically), driller, and landowner. The reference below to the mythic Gib Morgan tales is interesting.

Reference:

A Brief Summary of Oil Industry Folklore – by Herman K. Trabish, from a blog – oilstorieshistories.blogspot.com , Sept. 24, 2006