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    Michigan Oil and Gas
    Michigan Oil and Gas
    Michigan Oil and Gas
    Ebook185 pages41 minutes

    Michigan Oil and Gas

    By Jack R. Westbrook

    ()

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    Michigan is commonly recognized as a manufacturing center and for its splendid tourist attractions. Lesser known is Michigan s role as a leader in the production of oil and gas. Since the discovery of commercial quantities of oil in Saginaw in 1925, Michigan has grown to become the 12th-largest natural gas and 17th-largest crude oil producer of the 34 states producing oil and gas. Michigan s petroleum heritage spans 64 of the state s 68 Lower Peninsula counties and has played a role in shielding communities from the financial devastation of the Great Depression, funding acquisition of hundreds of public recreation projects through the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, and rising to meet environmental challenges through improving technologies. Michigan Oil and Gas documents that heritage with photographs from the Clarke Historical Library Norman X. Lyon and Michigan Oil & Gas News Collections.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2006
    ISBN9781439633014
    Michigan Oil and Gas
    Author

    Jack R. Westbrook

    Jack R. Westbrook, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan author, was Managing Editor of the Michigan Oil & Gas News in that city 1973-2001. In 2005, Westbrook worked with Clarke Historical Library at the Mount Pleasant Michigan campus of Central Michigan University, cataloging more than 18,000 petroleum history photos, identifying many and creating a searchable photo database of more than 5,000 photos of industry people 1933-2005. For three years he was a monthly contributor to Michigan Traveler magazine before leaving that pursuit early in 2006 to pursue book projects. He now writes a regular photo history column for the Morning Sun, Mt. Pleasant’s daily newspaper.He has written and/or edited three books about Michigan’s oil and gas industry: and Michigan Oil and Gas, a photo history of the industry released by Arcadia Publishing in September, 2006.Westbrook also wrote Mount Pleasant Then and Now. He has written six more photo history books and one novel since. Westbrook wrote articles regarding the Michigan petroleum exploration and production industry in national trade and statewide general press publications. As a speaker on Michigan petroleum history, he has addressed every Michigan petroleum industry trade organization and numerous civic organizations in Michigan, as well as groups in Washington D.C. and Boston MA; including being the only non-attorney ever to keynote the Michigan Bar Association Oil and Gas Workshop in 1990. In the mid-1980s,Westbrook is a public speaker and has appeared at book signings and/or speeches 154 times since September, 2008

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      Michigan Oil and Gas - Jack R. Westbrook

      decades.

      INTRODUCTION

      In 1925, the discovery of the Saginaw field marked the popularly accepted birth date of Michigan as a commercially producing oil state. The late 1920s through early 1950s proliferated with relatively shallow oil and gas field finds throughout the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

      The mid-1950s saw the discovery of the Albion-Scipio Trend, which, to date, has produced more than 125 million barrels of oil from a single reservoir, qualifying as a major oil field by worldwide definition. The late 1960s saw the discovery of the Niagaran Reef Trend, heralding the 1970s tripling of Michigan oil production and multiplying Michigan natural gas production six times.

      The early-1980s discovery of deep strata natural gas production, still an emerging frontier, along with the potential of shallower zones and new technologies, signaled even greater production potential than any previous in Michigan’s petroleum history.

      The late 1980s and early 1990s were punctuated by an unprecedented upsurge of drilling activity in the shallow Antrim Shale of Northern Michigan.

      With expanded Michigan market pipeline networks, Antrim Shale expanded development, and new horizontal drilling technologies, the 1990s ushered the state into a new era as a substantial natural gas production state. In the late 1990s, modern record-low wellhead prices of oil and natural gas devastated the petroleum industry in Michigan and nationwide.

      The early 2000s found Michigan petroleum explorers maintaining abbreviated drilling programs while recovering from the price devastations of the late 1990s. In 2005, the number of holes drilled in the state continued coming off bottom from the record low of the year 2000.

      Over 51,066 holes have been drilled in Michigan to date in the search for oil and gas, resulting in 14,782 oil wells, 12,663 natural gas wells, 3,005 facility wells, and 21,076 dry holes. From less than two percent of Michigan land area, 1.257 billion barrels of crude oil and 6.872 trillion cubic feet of natural gas have been produced from 64 Michigan Lower Peninsula counties.

      Michigan citizens hold more than 8,000 jobs directly related to oil and gas exploration, production, refining, and transportation and related supportive supplies and services. Michigan private mineral owners currently receive over $196 million annually in royalties for oil and gas production from beneath their land.

      The State of Michigan’s oil and gas income from state-owned lands (royalties, rentals, and fees) has exceeded a billion dollars, not including severance taxes and oil and gas fees ($66.749 million in fiscal year 2004), in addition to the rollover effect on the Michigan economy of income, sales, and payroll taxes. Oil and gas royalties from state-owned lands fund the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund. Wellhead value of Michigan oil and gas production in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, was $1.341 billion.

      Michigan petroleum exploration and production industry is the principal revenue source for the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, which has funded the acquisition and improvement of 1,491 public recreation projects in Michigan worth over $672 million with royalties from oil and gas exploration and production activities on state-owned mineral properties since 1978.

      Currently crude oil accounts for 22 percent of Michigan’s principal mineral production while natural gas accounted for 29 percent, combining for over half of Michigan’s mineral resources production. Michigan’s geology provides the largest natural gas storage capacity of any state in the nation. This oil and natural gas production capability and natural gas storage capacity is important, since 47 percent of the U.S. population and more than half the nation’s manufacturing capacity is within a 500-mile radius of Detroit. Continued and improved home-state energy production growth can be a key to sound Michigan economic expansion, as opposed to dependence on unstable outside energy supplies.

      One

      THE EARLY YEARS

      The bowl-shaped Michigan geological basin is the sedimentary rock layered remains of an ancient tropical sea. These layers of formations are named for the place where that formation reaches closest to the earth’s surface, or outcrops. The Michigan Basin was the cradle of the worldwide petroleum industry when, in 1858, a hole was hand dug to 13 feet in the gum beds of Oil Springs, Ontario, (where Michigan’s Dundee formation outcrops) and filled with free flowing oil. Later this well was deepened to 39 feet with a spring-pole rig. In 1859, Edward Drake drilled an oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, and began the process of

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