A LAMPFUL OF OIL.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 213, 25 October 1888, Page 3

A LAMPFUL OF OIL.

From Harper s Magazine. (Continued.) The petroleum industry of Baku may b said to date from 1872, when the crown monopoly was abolished, and the territoiy divided into lots of twenty-five acres each and sold to the highest bidder. This brought the petroleum resources of the region to public attention; but up o 1867 their deve>opment was seriously restricted by the onerous tax collected fr in the product. Io 1875 Robert Nobel, a >wede whose brother albert invented dynamite, and whose brother Ludwig was a rich shipbuilder o . the Neva, located m Baku, and erected a small refinery. A few years later he was joined by Ludwig, who invested his fortune and br tins in the petroleum industry. They introduced modern ideas in a vigorous manner that completely revolutionised the previous methods of the il business of that region, and in fac’ they created the industry They imported skilled well-borers with iheir tools from Pennsylvania, and constructed a pipe eight miles in length from Baku to the wel s at Balakhaui, replacing the old mudeof transportation on Persian Carts. At the

present time there are seven lines of pipe between these two points, besides a railway. The grea obstacles to overcome were the remoteness of the refineries from the market and the difficulty and excessive cost of transporting the refined article to the centres of consumption. In 1879 they began the construction of a fleet of cistern steamers, specially designed and built for the purpose of carrying oil in bulk on the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the Volga. The?e vessels were constructed in Sweden, and fl >ated in halves

through canals to the Volga, where they were united. They have a leng h of 250 feet, beam 28 feet, and depth in water when loaded 10 to 12 feet. Mr Redwood states that “the whole of the bows and forward part of the steamer forms one large cistern, furnished with two longitudinal bulkheads and several transverse bulk heads, to prevent oscillation of the liquid when the vessel is roiling in a heavy sea. The engines and boilers are amidships, and aft.-f these are two cylindrical vertical tanks of a diameter about equal to the beam of the vessel, rising somewhat above the level of the deck ” The casp an is a stormy sea, and the voyage to the mouth of the Volga is 460 miles. (The

first experiment in shipping od in bu k across the Atlantic was declared to be a failure, and American oil i usually ex« parted in barrels or cases, but during the month of October last the American ship, Crusader, carried in bulk from New York to Liverpool 177,400 gallons of oil.) The Caspian steamers can pioceed no further than about twenty miles from the mouth of the Volga, as the er is too shallow to allow their passage. To meet this difficulty the Messrs Noble constructed a number of tank barges to convey the oil of Tsaritzin, where they built large storage tanks, sidings, cooper shops, etc At this point they met the Tsaritzin-Griazi Railway, which connects with the railway system of Russia, and they built 1500 tank cars to transport the oil into the interior for general distribution.

The refinery at Black Town, the Hunter’s Point of Baku, covers seventy-five to eighty acres, and about eight thousand men are said

to be employed by the various firms and companies at that place. The firm of Nobel Brothers has passed into the hands of the Nobel Company, which occupies in Russia relatively the same position as the Standard does in this country. As a rule, American producers make light of the Kuasian production, and the American exporters of refined oil contend that inarmuch as only about one and a half per cent, of European consumption is supplied by Russian refineries, they have no fears of Russian competition. That they underestimate the capabilities of that region is apparent, if we may believe such observers as Charles Marvin, an English authority on Russia, or Boverton Redwood, the chemist of the London Petroleum Association, and the statement of well-informed Americans who have visited that region. Mr Reedwood, who recently returned from a tour of inspection, states that “ the oil field from which the Baku refiners are supplied is not, in fact, more than three miles square, and on this small tract there are flowing wells or fountains which ap patently could supply the whole world with lamp oil and lubricating oil. . . . There is, I believe, no reason to doubt that something like 1000 to 1200 square miles of the Aspheron Peninsula may be fairly regarded as more or less productive oil territory ... 1 had seen wells in America that were considered remarkable in regard to the quantity of oil yielded, and had read accounts of the productiveness of the Russian wells, but I was, I must confess, wholly unprepared for the evidences of abundant supply .... The well I saw spouting (Nobel’s No 18) yields at the rate of 1,125,000 gallons (say 27,000 barrelsjper twenty-four hours when opened (it is shut down by a valve attachment when its product is not needed), and it is by no means the most productive, th it has been struck, the Droojba well and Nobel’s No. 9 well having for a time yielded about double the quantity. ” The significance of this statement will be realised when it is remembered that a 5000 barrel well in this country is considered very large indeed, and that the largest ever opened here made less than 10,000 barrels iu twenty-four hours.

No effort has been made to develop the resources of that reg on, at> the 400 wells already opened have supplied more than the refineries could use, and in its crude form at the the oil has only a nominal value, say from 10 to 25 cents per barrel. It costs more to drill w- Ils here than her>s, pr say $lO,OOO against an average of $2500 to $3OOO This is owing to the harder rock generally encoyn ered, und greater cost of machinery, the average depth being only about 450 feet The oil seems to 11© in ueha, and when one as exhausted and stops flowing, upon deeper b »riug another reservoir is tapped. There are only about one hundred of these wells actually yielding oil at any one time, and though the figures are not so exact as those obtained of American production, the ou put in 1879 is given at 370,000 t0n5—2,590,000 barrels, and in 1884, 1,130,000 tonsr= 7,910,000 barrels. Upon goud authority it miy be said that the present daily produc tion of Russian oil averages 35,000 barrels. (TQ I3E CONTINUED).