East Texas Oil Field

At one time, downtown Kilgore had more than 1,000 active wells clustered in a tight area, making it the densest oil development in the world.

This sandstone unit was deposited during a period when East Texas was a shallow sea, approximately 100 million years ago.

During a subsequent period it was uplifted with the Sabine Uplift, eroded, and then covered again by the sea, which this time unconformably deposited a layer of impermeable chalk, the Austin Chalk, creating a stratigraphic trap – a situation where oil, which is lighter than water and migrates upwards, reaches a point where it can move no farther, and pools.

A 1932 study showed that oil wells stopped flowing when water pressure dropped below 800 pounds per square inch.

Finally, an enterprising Alabama man, Columbus Marion Joiner, was the first with enough persistence to succeed, and on October 3, 1930, his Daisy Bradford No.

By 2 October, the casing was cemented in, and the well was ready to be brought in, with over 8000 persons on hand to bear witness.

That these wells were in a connected oil reservoir was not immediately obvious to those who drilled them, as no field this large had ever been discovered on the North American continent.

3 discovery, Hunt met with him at the Baker Hotel in Dallas in November 1930 and bought the well and 5,580 acres for $1.34 million.

[11][3]: 172–175 [10]: 66, 73–75, 83–84, 90–96 It was the enormous quantities of oil from the East Texas Oil Field and their importance to the Allied effort in World War II that led to the creation of the world's largest pipeline up until that time, the "Big Inch", a 24-inch (610 mm), 1,400-mile (2,300 km) pipeline which transported crude to refineries in the Philadelphia area.

By the end of the war, over 350 million barrels (56,000,000 m3) of crude flowed from East Texas to the northeast states through the Big Inch.

The significance of the region to Texas' overall production, however, has been tempered by the increase of drilling activity in the Eagle Ford Shale and the Permian Basin.