?A 1938 hand-drawn map by Donald T. May of the Burning Well Field in Pennsylvania is yielding accurate information for a company working the field now. Map courtesy of Ryder Scott Co.

?Memories of the Civil War were still fresh in the minds of the people in Pennsylvania when the first well was drilled at Burning Well Field near the town of Kane. Through a series of sales, the land the well was on was passed from one family to the next for 100-plus years.
Then, in 1938, a map was hand-drawn and colored for a client, Page Oil Co., by Donald T. May, reservoir analysis firm Ryder Scott Co.’s first employee. He used a technique that he pioneered in 1935 that shows the field’s permeable sand thickness based on chip-coring analysis. The map provided petrophysical data from a single plug of sand.


Jump into the present when privately held Wind City Oil & Gas, based in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, obtained the land and a records search produced the map. The company is now using a page of 1930s history to leap into the future.


“It is strange to think that we are using a map drawn in 1938 and getting very good results,” says Patrick Imbrogno, vice president of production at Wind City. “It’s low-tech, but that’s what works here. Every well we drill adds a new modern log to the old data sources.”


Burning Well Field, about three miles south of Bradford Field, near Kane, Pennsylvania, primarily produces from the second Bradford sand. ­­­­­That field and others in the region produce Pennsylvania-grade oil high in paraffin and ideal for motor oil and lubricant. The first major production in the area came in the 1890s when South Penn, which years later would become Pennzoil, began drilling.


Houston-based Ryder Scott business development manager Mike Wysatta says that, by the 1930s, Ryder Scott employees were analyzing core samples and offering data to clients from its laboratory in Bradford, Pennsylvania.


“Recently, we were at the NAPE Expo in Houston when a gentleman came up and asked if we had any information to go along with a Ryder Scott map he had from the 1930s,” Wysatta says. “We keep information for about 10 years, so we weren’t able to get additional, older data from our archives.”


The gentleman was Imbrogno.


He says, “We knew the field had gone through a succession of owners. One of them kept very good notes and, in a small notebook, I found that map.”


Burning Well Field isn’t in the headlines. In fact, it’s doubtful that it ever made national headlines—maybe just a few lines in the local newspapers as the first wells were drilled. The wells were drilled by cable-tool rigs and then reinforced with wooden conductor pipe that has been preserved by oil residue. Some of the pipes are fractured—showing the damage from shock waves caused in the late 1860s when nitroglycerin was used as a fracing agent.


At best, in those days, it could be called a marginal field, Imbrogno says.


He adds that 89 of the 129 original stripper wells made by Wind City produce about 300 barrels and 1 million cubic feet of gas a month from Upper Devonian rocks. Wind City owns the mineral rights to about 5,000 gross and net acres and has received permits to drill 90 more wells with target depths of about 2,300 feet.


The economics of drilling in the area are favorable, Imbrogno says, adding that the average well costs about $110,000.


The company plans to frac newly drilled wells using openhole completions to eventually replace many of the old wells. These new wells produce 10 to 20 barrels a day initially. They eventually drop off to about two or three barrels a day with associated gas after three or four months. After that, it’s a marathon with very little decline for many years.

The 1938 map is shown here in relation to a modern map of Pennsylvania Burning Well Field is about three miles south of Bradford Field, near Kane, Pennsylvania.

Wind City is targeting at least a 30% rate of return on its wells.


“One of the first wells drilled, back in the 1870s, is still pumping today,” he says. “Starting with some pretty ancient technology with a description of the wells, we started looking at the field. It was pretty apparent that this formation was grossly underdeveloped.”
Working in Pennsylvania isn’t like developing wells in Texas or along the Gulf Coast, he adds.


Pennsylvania is where oil was first produced commercially. Edwin Drake drilled it in 1859 in Venango County, near Titusville, about an hour from Burning Well Field. Since then, more than 350,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled in the state.


In 2005, the state produced about 3.6 million barrels of crude oil, and 168 billion cubic feet of gas. Most oil wells produce a few barrels of oil per week, and average gas-well production is less than 11,000 cubic feet per day, according to state records.


Fields typically lie west and north of the Allegheny Front and west and north of a line from Somerset County in the southwest to Bradford County in the north-central part of the state. Oil fields are generally limited to a swath from Washington and Beaver counties on the Ohio border, to Warren and McKean counties on the New York border.


Imbrogno says, “I’ve worked in this area for a long time and I’m from here. The standard operating procedure for successful companies here is to use as much science as necessary to maximize your production without killing your economics. Here we have lots of reserves in traditional formations, but they are in or near many old fields.


­“The map is very accurate. We didn’t have much original modern log or original primary production information. There were a few old gamma-ray logs available from recently drilled wells—from the 1960s—but not much. We had to use the old drilling records and the Ryder Scott map to start high-grading locations to drill.”


With most U.S. onshore E&P investment attention on shale plays such as the Haynesville or Barnett, smaller fields need investors’ attention as well, Imbrogno says. “Those fields can be a huge long-term reserve opportunity if handled in a cost-effective manner by prudently spending money on modern technology when appropriate to maximize our return on investment.”


Oil prices of more than $140 a barrel are giving marginal fields, such as Burning Well, a new lease on life. “There is a lot of life left in these fields. That well still producing from the 1870s still gets pumped every week.”


The whole story about the map could be a parable about the nation’s search for energy, Wysatta says.


Just how important are marginal fields? According to a study by energy-consulting firm Warlick International, there are about 400,000 marginal oil wells in the U.S. Together, they produce about 310 million barrels per year with a combined value of about $22 billion.
Generally, a well is considered a stripper if it produces a daily average of 15 or fewer barrels of oil equivalent.


According to the U.S. Department of Energy, one of six barrels of oil produced comes from a marginal well, and more than 78% of the total U.S. wells are now classified as such.


Meanwhile, more than 260,000 stripper gas wells in the Lower 48 are making more than 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas a year, or about 7% of total Lower 48 output. Stripper wells are more common in older producing regions, most notably Appalachia, Texas and Oklahoma.
Once a marginal field is abandoned, the oil that remains behind is often lost forever.


But Burning Well Field is far from being abandoned.


“I think you will see marginal fields like this become even more important with today’s (oil and gas) prices,” Wysatta says. “The economics are there and, with today’s prices, these fields are pretty important. I think you will see more attention being paid to fields like this.”
Imbrogno says he and Wind City knew going into their purchase of the acreage that they would not be looking at wells that produce headlines. Instead, these are long-life wells that still have a lot of potential.


“With all the hype about the shale plays, this field shows that, with a little detective work we did with that map and old well records, you can get the answers to help rejuvenate some of these older fields. The map and records may be low-tech, but they are working well for us.”