In a previous life, I was the Exploration Director for a very small international oil & gas exploration and production company based out of London, UK. Despite our small size and market capitalization, we had a a full listing on the London Stock Exchange.
At various times under my jurisdiction, the company was operating exploration licences in East Africa and Asia, however we also had a number of small oil & gas production assets in the USA, in Texas and Louisiana.
The assets in Texas and Louisiana were mainly mature fields that the company was operating in managed production decline, or in the case of several, exploring with new data for the potential development of previously unexploited additional reserves.
Several of the more mature fields were what is known as ‘stripper fields’, where most of the easy oil had long since been produced and the remaining production wells, known as ‘stripper wells‘, typically produced less than a single barrel of oil per day making them only marginally economic above a certain oil price. Key to profitability with such wells is a low operating (management) cost per well. (A barrel of oil is equivalent to 35 imperial gallons, which is 42 US gallons or about 159 litres.)
Such wells normally need assistance to produce oil, i.e., to help the oil rise to the surface, and typically this is achieved by using a pumpjack, often known as a beam pump or more commonly to the layman as a ‘nodding donkey’.
The Somerset Oil Field is located some 12 miles southwest of the city of San Antonio in Texas. Discovered in 1913, at one point the field was the world’s most extensive shallow oil field, however production rates were never high, averaging less than 10 bbls oil/day. Over the years mainy wells have been shut in and today many wells may only produce 2 or 3 barrels of per week. In such low productivity wells, the pump jacks may only operate for a few hours per day or even per week, with the oil collected every week or two from a nearby storage tank.
My visit to the field was really a bit of a sightseeing trip as I was already in San Antonio and Houston for other business reasons, but I was invited to visit the field late one afternoon, partly because my colleague who was the head of the USA subsidiary of the company had also suggested that we could also find some Stone-Age arrowheads and other flints in the area.
We visited the field along with Wayne, the Field Production Manager, who came out with us also to monitor some of the production wells. Unfortunately we didn’t get out to field until late afternoon/early evening just as the light was starting to fade, but quite fascinating to see so many of these small stripper wells that were still (just) profitable.
The field was covered in typical Texas scrub, short stunted trees and shrubs, many covered and dripping with ‘Spanish moss‘ and Tillandsia, commonly known as Air plants. The scrub was crisscrossed with dirt tracks in the dusty red laterite soil, leading from one wellhead and beam pump to another, all connected with small diameter flowlines and powerlines.
I used the widest zoom setting available on my lens, a 17-55mm Nikkor, to catch as much of the surrounding landscape as possible. The light was quite ‘pale’ with a low sun and a light mist developing but I kept the aperture stopped down to f10 in order to capture in detail all the surrounding equipment and the tracery of the surrounding shrubs. Keeping the speed to ISO-200 allowed a handheld shutter speed of 1/40s at f10 – I could have easily increased the speed to ISO-400 or higher, but I wanted to keep noise to a minimum. Admittedly several of the images showed a degree of camera shake, but a couple including this one were acceptably sharp.
The image was not posed, I feel the composition works well with the angle of the top of the trees in the background, the angle of the beam pump, and the direction of Wayne’s gaze all converging towards the bright area on the horizon where the sun was going down. Also, for me at least, the stark skeletal branches and twigs of the shrubs and trees, appearing devoid of life (due to it being early Spring at the time of the photo), are metaphors for the declining oil field with low production.
Stripper oil fields such as Somerset are at the opposite end of the spectrum to those normally operated by the major international oil companies in places such as the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, but none-the-less can be extremely profitable if management and operating costs are tightly controlled, due to the cumulative production from the large quantity of associated production wells.
Unfortunately, being primarily a work trip, by the time we had finished visiting the wells the light had faded, and we never got to look for arrowheads.