One of the most novel solutions for a huge problem in tapping the oil under south Louisiana wetlands was the brainchild of a Panamanian saloon keeper who’d never set foot here.
As early as the 1920s, geologists knew that oil lurked below our marshlands, but engineers struggled to find a good way to get to it. At first, they simply tried to move drilling rigs from dry land into the marsh, but that didn’t work very well. It was hard to set up a heavy derrick in soggy silt. As the Shell News reported in its July 1938 edition, “In these coastal marshes where land is scarcely more than a series of floating dirt rafts insecurely anchored by vegetation, there is nothing solid upon which to build a derrick.”
Drillers had to build platforms on pilings sunk deep into the marsh. But that was cumbersome and expensive. An early Texaco rig in Terrebonne Parish, for example, required more than 50 pilings, each of them 60 feet long. Sinking and building a platform on them required more work and worry than most companies wanted to deal with.
A 2008 history of the offshore industry notes, “Large expenditures of time and money were required to prepare the location and foundation, construct heavy board roads, move in, rig up and tear down the derricks … and to haul them to a new location. For all but a few companies, these expenses were prohibitive.” (Minerals Management Service Study 2008-042) After several years of doing all of that, Texaco engineer G. I. McBride came up with a design for a barge big enough for a derrick and drilling equipment that could be towed to a location where it would be sunk into the marsh to provide a stable drilling base. But when he began to explore the idea, he found, to his amazement, that Louis Giliasso, our saloonkeeping friend, had watched drillers attacking the same problem in Venezuela and had come up with, and patented, the same idea.
Bradshaw
It took months to find Giliasso in his bar in Colon, Panama, but Texaco did track him down and worked out a deal allowing them to use the design.
The first rig was named for the patent holder and was actually made with two connected barges with a space between them for drilling. It worked so well that Texaco built a fleet of Giliasso-model barges. Seven of them were working in coastal Louisiana by 1935.
According to the MMS study, “Other companies followed Texaco’s pioneering example, and by the late 1930s dozens of ‘floating derricks’ could be seen moving through the bayous and … canals of south Louisiana. By 1938, the industry had drilled 3,300 wells in parishes adjacent to the Gulf.
But their use was limited to inland waters, and not all of those. The barges could be used only in ten feet of water or less and, as MMS recorded, “Nobody … was willing to tempt fate in the Gulf by trying to drill from a barge.” The first operations in the Gulf were from platforms built on pilings like those that were once used in the marsh, with the same limitations of time and expense.
Nobody was sure Gulf drilling was worth all that bother. In early 1941, for example, geologist O.L. Brace wrote in an industry study, “It may be tentatively assumed that the Gulf of Mexico is a potential source of … oil. Whether or not it will ever be economically feasible to explore these waters … is a question for the future to answer.”
That question was answered in 1947, when Kerr-McGee decided to try the risky adventure of drilling for oil out of sight of land and through all of 15 feet of water. The rig followed the old practice. The derrick was built on a 38-foot by 71-foot wooden deck supported by sixteen pilings driven 100 feet into the ocean floor. As primitive as it was, that well proved that Gulf exploration was worth the investment required for new technology.
Today, there are more than 4,000 production platforms and drilling rigs off the coast of Louisiana alone, none of them built on flimsy wooden pilings.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
