THE HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICAL PROSPECTING
PART TWELVE - GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH CORPORATION

Chapter 36  -  Oklahoma and Reflections

The first three GRC crews had been activated out of the Houston Division under party chiefs Rosaire, McDermott and Kerns in March, April and May of 1926. Party #4 originated at the GRC Tulsa headquarters with Ben S. Weatherby as the party chief. Party #4 was the first Amerada party and it employed Frank Borman as chief observer and John Crowell as junior observer. Frank Borman had been transferred out of the Laboratory into the field and in May had brought the fourth set of GRC refraction equipment from Bloomfield to Tulsa. As soon as Ben Weatherby's graduate studies were over for the school ...

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"This is the Viola limestone —— giving us this reflection.“

´The area of this initial success in Oklahoma was Township 8 North, Ranges and 5 East. Duncan now mapped an extension to the Bowlegs oilfield and Amerada was sold on the reflection methode. By the end of May, Amerada had placed three partie's on a contract basis, shooting reflections in and around Wewoka, Oklahoma; making use of the technique which J. E. Duncan had perfected. Salvatori, who had moved his party from Shreveport to Timpson, Texas; returned to Oklahoma in early May to form the next full-time reflection crew after Duncan. Dr. Peacock, who was operating in East Texas for Amerada was also rushed to the Seminole Basin to form the third reflection party. In June a fourth full time crew began operations on the Seminole Plateau under Dr. Norman Beese. Dr. Eugene Rosaire made his chief observer, Ollie Lester party chief of GRC Party #1 and moved to Oklahoma to establish an office in Shawnee, as supervisor of the four Amerada reflection parties. In August a fifth Amerada reflection party was organized under Sam Stewart and started to work portions of southern Oklahoma out of Chickasha. Stewart also reported to Supervisor Rosaire.

After its initial success on an oil pool extension, Amerada Petroleum Corporation was to drill four straight oilfield openers in the Seminole Basis based on reflection seismograph surveys. Amerada #1 Harjo Gravel Pit, Section 1-8N-4E, Pottawatomie County, was the Simpson dolomite discovery in the Maud oilfield; completion date, May 15, 1928. Amerada #1 Edwards, Section 22-9N-5E, Seminole County, was the Wilcox sand discovery weIl of the South Earlsboro field and came in on February 7, 1930. Amerada #1 Chase, Section 29-9N-6E, Seminole County, was completed on August 23, 1930, the Wilcox discovery in the West Seminole oilfield. The Wilcox discovery on the Carr City field of 3-8N-5E, Seminole County, came in on November 5, 1930, from the Amerada #1 J. Tiger.

In June of 1928, Sam Stewart's Amerada crew left off shooting reflections out of Guthrie, Oklahoma and moved to Athens in East Texas to start a fault delineation survey with the refraction seismograph. This was a twosection party; each section worked a fourteen hour shift every other day. Reginald Sweet and Harold Shore were the two chief observers. King Hubbert came along from Guthrie with this party as surveyor and permit man. I was sent over from Carol Rosaire's Lake Charles party to do the fault computing. In August of 1928, William Kendall relieved Dr. Norman Beese as Party Chief of an Oklahoma reflection party. Dr. Beese relieved Stewart on the East Texas Amerada refraction party by this time operating out of Corsicana. San Stewart moved out to New Mexico to take Eugene McDermott's place as the head man of GRC Party #2, as McDermott moved up to supervisor. In 1928, Frank Borman became a party chief in Oklahoma. In 1929, Reginald Sweet headed Rycade's first reflection party, working in the Texas Gulf Coast. Harold Shore, John Crowell and C. V. A. Pittman also reached party chief status. Harold Shore started his leadership career by relieving various party chiefs as they went on their vacations.

Chalmers Pittman was working the Gulf Coast for the Gulf Production Company. This crew worked a series of prospects from Orange to Victoria, Texas, in a period from November, 1929, to July, 1930, with Jimmie Jett as chief observer and William Green as junior observer. The Pittman party was a refraction crew but they were experimenting with reflections. Gulf wanted a GRC reflection party the worst way. Late in 1929 and early in 1930, L. P. Garrett delivered the same message to Dr. Karcher; Mr. Frank A. Leovy, President of Gulf Oil, wanted to talk with Karcher and would Karcher please stop in Pittsburgh at his earliest eonvenience? But Dr. Karcher knew that Amerada was not interested in contracting reflection parties to outside companies. He managed to stay too busy to go to Pittsburgh.

Early in 1928, Dr. E. E. Rosaire abandoned his reflection supervisory office in Shawnee and went back to Houston to take charge of the Southern Division office for the GRC. In 1929, Rosaire found himself in the middle of 4 major refraction-reflection controversy. Ollie Lester, dean of Gulf Coast refraction interpreters, had discovered a deep, deep Texas salt dome for the Rycade Oil Corporation using fan shots ten to twelve miles in length. After one deep dry hole had been drilled on the prospect, Reginald Sweet, who had had wide experience with both Gulf Coast and Oklahoma shooting, was placed at the head of a reflection party for Rycade and sent to check the existence of the deep, deep salt dome, with J. L. Copeland as his observer. Sweet was doing his own interpretation. After reshooting the refraction prospect and finding no indication of any reverse dip, he condemned the area as being devoid of either a salt dome or any other type of closure. Dr. Rosaire tried to shake Sweet' s conviction that the prospect was negative, but could not. Gene tried to shake Lester's conviction that a salt dome existed on said prospect, but could not. Refractions won that first round and another deep dry hole was drilled by Rycade.

Henry Salvatori, who was operating a Rycade refraction party in Chambers and Jefferson Counties, Texas, in 1929, ran into similar indications of a possible deep, deep, salt dome on the Jackson Ranch prospect using nine to fourteen mile shots. Karcher, De Golyer, Rosaire, Salvatori and the writer held a series of conferences on this problem at the La Salle Hotel in Beaumont. Dr. Karcher suggested that such long fan shot distances were likely to be inaceurate when calculated from blast-phone breaks because temperature and wind determinations at ground level might bear little relation to the high altitude sound paths of the air waves. We surveyed out the distances with a group of transits and found sizable blast-phone errors, but a complex anomaly remained on the map. De Golyer then expressed his geological opinion; that we might very weIl be looking at a cluster of three salt domes, which would naturally give a complicated picture difficult to interpret. Again, Reginald Sweet's Rycade reflection party was called in and again, without hesitation, the area was condemned by reflections as being without any structure. Salvatori was there to back up Sweet's judgment and this time Dr. Rosaire was convinced of the superiority of the reflection method; no deep, deep dry holes were drilled on Jackson's Ranch by Rycade.

Eugene McDermott, Reginald Sweet and T. I. Harkins all realized that Gulf Coast reflections had to be interpreted as a group, rather than as individual correlated reflections. T. I. Harkins was the first to put the Dip Method of reflection shooting into words and to formulate a definite theory. In 1929, while his party was shooting reflections on Darrow dome in Ascension Parish, he noticed that abnormal stepouts in the reflection time were rather characteristic of the area, and that these abnormal stepouts reversed. Harkins correctly attributed this phenomenon to dipping beds, and pointed out that when recording up-dip, the reflection arrival times for the farthest geophone should be abnormally short, and when recording down-dip they should be abnormally longe. The method was then placed on a more qualitative basis, and is now the recognized method for mapping the younger formations of the Gulf Coast.