DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say — and friend, this one's worth pulling over for. Somewhere out in Pecos County, beneath a stretch of West Texas scrub that most oil men had already written off, the ground was keeping one of the biggest secrets in the history of petroleum. And on October 29, 1926, Mid-Kansas Oil and Gas Company — a subsidiary wholly owned by the Ohio Oil Company — finally got the ground to talk.
They brought in the I. G. Yates 'A' No. 1 well, and what came up out of that hole changed everything.
Now, you want to know how deep they had to drill to find it? Eleven hundred and fifty feet. That's shallow.
Barely a warmup by oil field standards. And yet that well had a rated potential daily flow of seventy-two thousand, eight hundred and sixty-nine barrels. Let that number just sit there a moment.
Seventy-two thousand, eight hundred and sixty-nine barrels. A day. From a well that barely got started going down.
Here's what makes it sweeter. The oil men of the day had a saying they repeated with considerable confidence: 'You won't find any oil west of the Pecos.' That was the conventional wisdom. Spoken like scripture.
Mid-Kansas Oil and Gas Company, working alongside its partner Transcontinental Oil Company, apparently did not subscribe to that particular gospel — and they kept right on working. The strike was, as the marker puts it, sensational. Scarcely more than a year after that first well came in, the Yates field had one hundred wells producing.
And two of those hundred had higher yields than the well that started it all. Under the twenty thousand acres of the Ira G. Yates ranch and the lands adjoining it lay one of the largest oil reserves in the world.
Now, a discovery that size could have turned into chaos — a wild stampede of drilling and pumping until the field ran dry. But something remarkable happened instead. The many developers voluntarily adopted proration.
They drew up their own plans for allocating and restricting production from the Yates field, and in 1928, the Texas Railroad Commission approved those plans. That made it the first complete proration of an oil field in the entire state of Texas — an important milestone in petroleum conservation. Ohio Oil Company, for its part, has since changed its name to Marathon Oil Company.
And that Yates field? The marker puts the well count at six hundred and seven. Six hundred and seven wells, all rooted in ground that the experts once swore would never give up a drop.
What the marker says
Opening one of greatest oil fields in the world, Mid-Kansas Oil and Gas Company (a subsidiary wholly owned by the Ohio Oil Company, whose name has now been changed to Marathon Oil Company) brought in the I. G. Yates "A" No. 1 well on October 29, 1926. The well at the shallow depth of 1,150 feet had a rated potential daily flow of 72,869 barrels. Previously oil men had said: "You won't find any oil west of the Pecos." This did not stop the work of Mid-Kansas Oil and Gas Company and its partner, Transcontinental Oil Company, later acquired by Marathon Oil Company. The strike was sensational. Scarcely more than a year later, the Yates field had 100 wells--two of which had higher yields than Yates No. 1. Under the 20,000-acres Ira G. Yates ranch and adjoining lands lay one of the largest oil reserves in the world. The many developers voluntarily adopted proration. Their plans for allocating and restricting Yates fields production were approved by the Texas Railroad Commission in 1928. This was the first complete commission in 1928. This was the first complete proration of an oil field in the state --and an important milestone in petroleum conservation. The Yates field now has 607 wells.