Risky Business: Oil Well Shooters in the Southwestern Oilfields

Early on May 11, 1934, Bill McKinney pulled out of the nitroglycerin factory he and his brother Lee operated in the Permian Basin town of Penwell, Texas. The operation was part of the Eastern Independent Torpedo Company, a business that exploded nitroglycerin- laden devices at the bottom of newly drilled oil wells to stimulate production. He drove a specially designed and equipped REO Speed-wagon north with a load of nitroglycerin to replenish the company's explosives storage facility near Amarillo. He had checked his load before he left and knew the cargo was secure. He drove all day fighting a relentless, excoriating west wind that buffeted the side of his truck. Red dust loomed like a fog hundreds of feet in the air; its choking grit swirled in the cab, stinging Bill's eyes and burning his throat. In two days that same superfine remnant of Texas Panhandle topsoil would foul the air along the Atlantic Seaboard and even coat the decks of ships 300 miles out to sea. The lingering effects of the first Dust Bowl dust storm would mean nothing to Bill McKinney, though, because eight miles south of Tulia, the nitroglycerin he hauled spontaneously exploded, perhaps as a result of a static charge produced by the constant hot dry wind that scoured the Great Plains from Canada to Texas.¹

From the 1860s until after World War II, oil well shooters represented the leading edge of petroleum production technology. Known professionally as torpedo companies, shooters like Bill McKinney developed their palette of skills largely through on-the-job training and trial-and-error experimentation. Their involvement ranged across the entire spectrum of the dangerous trade, including manufacturing and transporting explosives, developing and manufacturing specialized tools, understanding and incorporating the benefits of tamping to shape and direct explosive charges, and designing and testing detonation devices.

Of the thousands of oil wells completed since William "Uncle Billy" Smith drilled the Drake Well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, only a fraction have come in as gushers or free flowing wells. Even the output those wells that initially erupt with oil gradually dimishes as natural pressure within the formation subsides. When production falls off, and even when a newly drilled well appears to be dry, productivity can be stimulated by fracturing the oil-bearing stratum (known as the oil sand) at the bottom of the well bore. For over a century after the first well stimulation in 1866, drillers fractured the oil sand by shooting, or detonating explosive charges at the bottom of the well. Creating a controlled explosion at a precise location hundreds and later thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface required a specialized combination of emerging science and technology, practical experience, and great personal risk—a job that few in the oil patch had the background or the nerve to consider.

Oil producers learned the importance of well stimulation, both as a function of well completion and in secondary recovery efforts, early in the history of the industry. Producers applied the rule of capture, a legal concept rooted in medieval English common law that dealt with migratory game, to the recovery of oil. Just as the game belonged to whomever could capture it, oil trapped in subsurface formations belonged to whomever drilled down into the earth and recovered it.² The idea was to extract as much oil as possible before someone else got it all. The shot created fissures that formed a web of channels in the rock surrounding the well. Shooting occurred only in fields where the sand was hard or nonporous. In fields such as those in where the oil sand is soft and porous, such as those in East Texas, shooting would be more likely to destroy rather than stimulate production. However, most oil fields in the United States, like those in West and North Texas, produce from sandstone, limestone, or so-called granite wash: formations that respond to shooting. Gravity moved the oil freed by the shot toward the well bore where it gushed to the wellhead or pumps delivered it to the surface.^3...