With the assistance of two eight-inch pipe lines 32 miles to Port Harford, a similar line 48 miles across the Isthmus of Panama, and a goodly fleet of vessels, the Union Oil Company scatters this oil from Seattle to San Diego, and from New York to Japan. Chile also has a share for the working of its nitre beds and its railways.
The little towns of Santa Maria and Orcutt receive with open pipes a tithe of the gas which nature has here stored, and which would otherwise escape the many safety valves, while the steam rig engines have often been run with direct gas pressure from the wells.
This land of gas and gushers is difficult of control, and is always ready to pop off at from 100 to 400 pounds pressure through the many 3,000-foot tubes which puncture its depths. When a new gusher is brought in, it sprays the adjacent hills with a glistening shadow of petroleum and is no respecter of persons or property. One new and frisky fury flowed 12,000 barrels per day, and delivered 4,000,000 cubic feet of gas every 24 hours for four months, gradually dropping to a production of 7,000 barrels, which it maintained for nearly a year, finally diminishing to 3,500, and now, after three and a third years, is still producing 250 barrels per day, having delivered during this time 3,000,000 barrels of petroleum, and enough gas to last San Francisco for three years. This is, with perhaps one exception, the most remarkable well in the history of oil industry, and is widely known as “Hartwell No. 1.”
The district contains two groups of wells, one contiguous to Orcutt, and the other near Lompoc. Danger from fire due to the excessive gas pressure of the Orcutt fields is exceedingly great, as evidenced by the burning of four “rigs” in the first two years of its history, during which time there were fifteen wells brought into production. The cost of these “rigs” exceeded the cost of the lighting plant, which is described in these notes, and no fires have since occurred in the sixty wells now producing. The advisability of the plant is therefore quite patent.
MAP OF ORCUTT OIL FIELDS ELECTRICAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM.
The lighting system employed in the Orcutt oil fields is perhaps only interesting in illustrating how the methods employed in large undertakings may be used to great advantage in the smaller enterprises to effect a large saving and to simplify conventional methods. The smaller undertakings often afford opportunities of saving a larger percentage in cost and operation in connection with the larger ones. In the present instance, an economy of $9,000 was made in a system which would have cost $30,000 if constructed along conventional lines.
As may be seen from some of the views in these notes, the country covered by the system is very hilly and stony, hard sandstone being everywhere prominent. Trees would have interfered considerably over perhaps a third of the line with ordinary construction, and being oak, it would have cost heavily to eliminate them. Although the winters in this section are very bleak and windy, no snow has ever fallen. The attached map shows the wells, which are unusually far apart and scattered over some 5,000 acres of land.