The Other Gulf Coast Oil Spill

At one point in my life I spent some time living at that avernal entrance to hell that is the northeast gulf coast of Texas.  During my time there I absorbed much butadiene into my lungs and some local history into my brain.  With the current oil well blowout in the gulf I have been thinking about one bit of largely forgotten history.

The gulf coast of Texas is prone to oil seeps where crude oil seeps up from the sea bed.  In many parts of the beaches you will find tar balls on the sand, which people often assume is pollution from the refineries, although at least part of it is from oil seeps.

Historically there was a "oil pond" off the coast west of the Sabine River estuary (The border of Texas and Louisiana).  I am talking about a major oil spill that lasted for centuries.  In the 1890s through 1910 it was described as being a mile wide and four miles long.  Dating back to spanish colonial days ships would shelter there during storms.

It "disappeared" in 1910.  Many people believe that this corresponded with the tapping of the salt dome that was the Spindletop oilfield.  Spindletop was the largest single oil producer in the world when it came in on 7 Jan. 1901.  (If memory serves, it produced something like ten percent of all the oil in the world that year.)  When oil was struck, the well blew out and the gusher of oil estimated at 70,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil a day for 9 days formed a lake of oil in the surrounding countryside before the workers invented the first device to cap a well blowout.  Imagine to pressure in that salt dome.  This well is responsible for the start of the Mobil, Gulf, and Texaco oil companies, and making Texas an oil state.  The salt dome oil fields also were a source of sulfur, which was produced by the Frasch process.

I have always wondered what we might learn about the effects of oil spills from this chronic spill and the recovery of the coast since the end of the oil pond.  Of course the presence of multiple oil refineries in the Sabine pass area would complicate any such research.

T.S. Hall