Drilling Themselves in

Having failed to tame the Dos Bocas blowout, Pearson in 1909 decided to bring in even more expertise. He hired Dr. C. Willard Hayes, director of the United States Geological Survey, to direct the field work. Hayes had met Pearson the year before while the geologist was visiting the site of the famous Dos Bocas blowout. Pearson subsequently convinced Hayes to enter the oil industry as a highly paid consultant without giving up his position at the U.S. Survey. Hayes was to engage field geologists and inspect their exploratory work once a year. In a preliminary survey, Hayes concluded that

Mexican demand for oil still exceeded supply, that heavy Mexican crude was not competitive with lighter American crude, and that the average cost of production was high. What Mexico needed was a big discovery of light crude.^[154] Hayes brought in a bright young geology student from the University of Oklahoma. C. Everitt DeGolyer needed no passport or visa to take the train down to Tampico. Mexican immigration officials merely asked if he were an "anarchista." Tampico was not yet an oil boom town, although El Aguila already occupied the five-story building across from the Imperial Hotel. The American geology student joined a company whose superintendent was a Scot; the bookkeeper, a Dutchman; and the manager of launches and transportation, an Englishman. The other American field geologists included Chester Washburne and Edwin B. Hopkins. DeGolyer traveled with them to the El Aguila properties west of Tuxpan. He mapped the Hacienda Tierra Amarilla, home of one of the company's Mexican lawyers. A younger brother, Manuel Peláez, was managing the hacienda. Twenty wells drilled at Tierra Amarilla were to produce only moderately. At nearby Tanhuijo, another small producer was struck.^[155] The search continued for the big gusher that would put Mexico on the world's oil maps.

At an hacienda named Potrero del Llano, young DeGolyer, who had just turned twenty-four, helped to choose the drilling sites for four exploratory wells. The American geologists mapped the upthrusting rock strata for indications of subterranean rooflike domes that trapped the oil deposits. Since Pennsylvania, the Americans were trained in the anticline theory of oil detection. Capt. Anthony Lucas had used the anticline theory to bring in the first Spindletop gusher. So had Pearson's geologists in Veracruz. DeGolyer later recalled how the first well at Potrero del Llano came in:

[W]e were all in the mess hall having dinner when there was a terrific roar, like the blowing off of a boiler. Nobody could think what could cause such a noise, so we all rushed out. Potrero del Llano #1 had drilled itself in. It had been drilled to a point so close to the rock holding oil that the oil finally just broke through and finished the job. . . . This discovery well, located by Geoffrey Jeffrey [a British geologist], was a small well that flowed by heads and made three or four hundred barrels a day. There was no difficulty in stopping the free flow of a well of that size, just a matter of closing a valve.^[156]

As 1910 drew to a close, Sir Weetman Pearson was reasonably satisfied with his geologists. They had begun Mexican domestic produc-

tion in the region west of Tuxpan known as the Faja de Oro, the "Golden Lane." The region derived its name from the fact that the crude discovered here was much lighter than that found farther north around Tampico. At 28 degrees Baumé, the Golden Lane crude contained valuable components of fuel oil, gasoline, and kerosene. With his geologists and drilling crews working on additional prospects, Pearson felt assured he would soon have enough domestic crude so that he would be able to cancel the purchases of Texas oil. He wanted a big well that would not stop with the mere turn of a valve.

DeGolyer located the fourth well site at Potrero del Llano. Drilling commenced in April 1910 and was suspended in June at a depth of 1,856 feet. Drilling crews then awaited completion of the pipeline, returning to the well two days before Christmas. On 27 December 1910, after the drillers had penetrated another fifty-five feet into the Tamasopo limestone, they stopped for the night. Since no gas emission had warned them that the drills were about to strike oil, the drillers had not placed a drilling valve over the wellhead. Potrero No. 4 came on its own at 2 A.M. The bailer, a long cylinder used to scoop out samplings from the well, was blown clear out of the well. A black plume of crude petroleum rose 250 feet into the air with a deafening roar and commenced to lay a coat of oil over all the vegetation — and human and animal life — for a radius of a mile around the well. The chief driller on duty scrambled through the underbrush in the darkness in order to extinguish the fires in the boilers. That the boilers had been placed some distance from the drilling platform prevented Potrero del Llano No. 4 from becoming another conflagration like Dos Bocas.

As it was, the Potrero well, flowing wildly, presented its own technological challenges. Lord Cowdray, as Sir Weetman Pearson was to be known after his elevation to the peerage in July 1910, was in Mexico City that December, introducing his sons Clive and Harold to the Mexican enterprises. DeGolyer was on horseback with Dr. Hayes, introducing the new general manager of El Aguila, Robert Stirling, to the Furbero field. Sterling left immediately for Potrero, but Hayes and DeGolyer were summoned to Mexico City. Yet before they arrived, Lord Cowdray himself had left by train for Potrero to take charge of capping the wild well. Lady Cowdray, the British ambassador, and Governor Landa y Escandón took charge of several days of social affairs toasting the young American geologist's success. DeGolyer did not arrive at his runaway well until a week had passed. He took the train through San Luis Potosí to Tampico and a launch through the Tamiahua lagoon.

Potrero del Llano had become bedlam itself. Accompanied by a large quantity of gas, the oil spewed out of the well at the rate of 100,000 bd, the pressure heating the oil to a temperature of 147 degrees F. Everyone was caked with oil, and the Buena Vista River was filled with so much oil that one could not see the water underneath.^[157] The crude flowed into the Tuxpan River and out onto the beaches of the Gulf Coast of Veracruz. Eventually, oil washed ashore on the beaches at Tampico, two hundred miles to the north. DeGolyer and a Mexican civil engineer surveyed a route for the urgently needed second pipeline to Tuxpan. Local jefes políticos ordered ranch foremen to bring in their peons to build earthen reservoirs to catch and store the flow. Thousands of Mexican villagers worked at Potrero at one time or another, most leaving after getting their first paycheck. They had to be replaced by others. Mexican women organized kitchens under oil-soaked canvas shelters. Never had the casual population of these livestock and agricultural districts been so mobilized.^[158] Indeed, the oilmen enlisted the support of local authorities to apply some coercive measures to get them to stay.

In the meantime, the immediate task was to prevent the spread of oil. Workers set fire to the crude on the river in an effort to minimize the damage to crops and farmland. The conflagration started five miles downstream from Potrero, lifting great billows of black smoke and soot into the humid air. Men constructed flumes, troughs that carried the oil swiftly downriver to the fire, and built a dam farther downriver to catch the crude that escaped the flames. Some of the oilmen's experience in the Baku oil fields of Russia contributed to the tactics used during the Potrero crisis.^[159]

The second task remained to control the ferocious plume of oil that spewed directly out of the well casing. Experienced engineers devised an elaborate valve dubbed the "Bell Nipple," after a design that an American driller had seen used on much smaller Texas gushers. The device, lying sideways, was attached to one side of the well casing by means of extended ratchets. The men worked slowly. They were beset by gas fumes that burned the eyes (a slice of potato held over the eyelids was found to provide relief), by the gusher's noise, and by sheets of oil constantly falling around the well. Eventually, they winched the bell nipple upright and over the blasting spout of crude. It was not until 25 January 1911 that the crews had tightened the bell nipple over the casing, but the valve device proved unable to control the flow and had to be replaced by a second, larger bell nipple in March. Then workers

constructed a mound of concrete and pipes over No. 4. Gradually, they diverted the flow into valves, earthen reservoirs, and the hurriedly constructed pipeline.

The work of El Aguila's geologists made hollow Doheny's boast that geology professors had not been successful at finding oil. Moreover, the fury of Potrero No. 4 challenged experienced British and American oilmen to devise additional technological solutions to problems peculiar to Mexican production. Best of all for El Aguila, the crude oil at Potrero No. 4 had an American Petroleum Institute rating of 21 degrees gravity. Unlike the heavy crude produced at Doheny's El Ebano in the north, the wells in the Faja de Oro contained large increments of fuel oil, kerosene, and gasoline — the valuable products of oil.^[160] El Aguila no longer had to import crude from Texas but, in fact, began to export to Texas and elsewhere.

The Britons and Americans who had directed the Potrero operation eventually gathered enough knowledge of geological conditions in the Huasteca to realize how fortunate they were to have saved the giant well. For the first time in petroleum history, they were exploiting deposits lying in limestone rather than a sandy formation. Holes drilled into the mare and limestone seldom collapsed, and the fierce flow of oil did not disturb the strata. They learned that the oil sands tended to plug fast-flowing wells in places like the Baku and Trinidad. If a well having the force of Potrero No. 4 had flowed uncontrolled in oil sands, it would have destroyed itself within days. It was rarely safe to allow a well sunk in oil sands elsewhere to produce at a rate faster than 2,000 bd, whereas Cowdray's men in Mexico had harnessed a well that, once it was pinched back, produced at the rate of 30,000 bd.^[161] These oil engineers also did not know on 31 March 1911, when they had definitely brought Potrero on line, that this well's future was to be equally as eventful as its discovery. Nor did they understand yet the long-term weakness of oil production in limestone formations.

El Aguila had other concerns in 1911. Finding itself suddenly awash in oil production, the company now had to move quickly to provide transport and markets. J.B. Body devised a floating loading dock in the shallows before the river port of Tuxpan, so that gulf tankers could take on crude oil approximately one-half mile from shore. Eventually, the Tuxpan terminal accommodated four tankers at once, loading at the rate of 120,000 gallons per day.^[162] The drilling crew at Potrero del Llano slowed down while others built a pipeline that carried the modest production of Tierra Amarillo and the first Potrero wells down to

the Tamiahua lagoon. From there, barges ferried the crude oil over to Tampico. Pipelines were completed from Potrero first to Tuxpan then to the deep-water port of Tampico. Almost immediately, El Aguila purchased land along the Tampico ship channel and began to build a second refinery. Shipping traffic in the Tamiahua lagoon and along the coast multiplied as El Aguila shipped oil in barges to Tampico and Veracruz. Potrero del Llano crude was shipped to Puerto México and pumped to the Minatitlán refinery. Lord Cowdray's son, Clive Pearson, as chairman, expanded the new Anglo-Mexican Petroleum Company into an eight-hundred-person firm distributing Mexican oil throughout Great Britain and the Continent.^[163]

Steam tankers began to arrive from the United States, and Lord Cowdray laid plans to build his own fleet to carry Mexican oil to Europe and Canada. Now, the prolific wells of both Pearson and Doheny had made Mexican oil competitive on the U.S. market, even though prices softened a bit. Mexican production burgeoned from 3.6 million barrels in 1910 to 12.6 million in 1911 (see table 4). Armed with technological superiority, financial wealth, access to foreign markets, and the political favor of Porfirio Díaz, the foreign businessmen had at last made Mexico not only a consumer of hydrocarbon energy but also a major producer. The oil industry was a powerful force for social change as well.