Identifier: bulletinuni10211919unit (find matches)
Title: Bulletin - United States National Museum
Year: 1877 (1870s)
Authors: United States National Museum Smithsonian Institution United States. Dept. of the Interior
Subjects: Science
Publisher: Washington : Smithsonian Institution Press, (etc.) for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt Print. Off.
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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h of Tampico. When struck, the oilgushed so rapidly that before the fire in the boiler of the engine running the drillingmachinery could be extinguished the flowing oil reached It and burst into a mass of flamewhich for two months burned 60,000 to 75,000 barrels of oil per day with a flame from800 to 1,400 feet in height, and 40 to 75 feet in width, making light enough to be seen byships 100 miles at sea, and to permit a newspaper to be read 17 miles away. After theloss of $3,000,000 the fire was put out, but the oil flowed so rapidly that it could notbe carried away or put In tanks, and the English owners saved their oil only by con-fining it in a reservoir one-fourth of a mile long made by heaping up earth embankmentsto keep the oil from flowing away like water. Even this well was later surpassed bythe Potrero del Lano No. 4 well near Tuxpam, Mexico, which yielded 160,000 barrels aday for some time.—^J. Russell Smith, Industrial and Commercial Geography, 1913,p. 409. PETKOLEUM. 37
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79968°—19—Bull. 102, vol. :r o~ cT o o ^ o o o ^ o o o o 3 o cT o o cT lo o •J ~ 38 BULLETIN 102, VOL. 1, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. notable quantities of natural gas, yield only under the inducement ofpumping. All wells, however, soon reach a maximum production,after which they pass into a period of decline, and eventually becomeextinct.^ So inexorable is this procedure that a curve may be plottedin advance depicting the future behavior of a given group of wells. When an oil well becomes extinct, its nonproductiveness does notsignify that all the oil is exhausted. On the contrary, current prac-tice in general leaves over half of the oil underground still clingingto the pores and capillary spaces in the rock. To obtain a greater yieldfrom productive ground constitutes a problem of the first magnitude,and promising results have been obtained by forcing compressed airinto some of the exhausted wells of a group, with the result that thelaggard oil is swept to the neighborhood

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