Fracking Pennsylvania

March 9, 2013 — 1947, Fracking, Penn State, Richard Morse

PA and Penn State Teach Fracking

In 1947 you could obtain from the Pennsylvania Mineral Industries Experiment  Station a paper written by my father.  It cost 25 cents to learn the science behind water flooding from The School of Mineral Industries.  He and his friend, Pete Terwillager, a co-author of this paper, would go on to work together to frack many a well.

Science Behind Fracking

This was the work my father did to earn his masters degree before I was born.  Water flooding is the subject of this research.  When he graduated with his masters he went to work in Tulsa for Stanolind, and so did Pete Terwillager. He obtained a patent for fracking together with Stanolind.  Now they were done with water injection as the displacement method, and had moved on to an oil like substance.

Fracking explained

My father grew up on the Cherokee Strip seeing all kinds of explosions done to procure petroleum.  His father, Ernest Morse, drilled for oil with a crew before the invention of the rotary bit, so they were desperate.  The fact that he eventually became the first man to make a numerical model of an oil field on a computer made him brilliant.  It did not change his relationship with the resources of the earth.  The wild-wild west, boomer sooner attitude is the reason they both lost and won.  These barons of resources saw themselves as saviors of society. It was years after my father’s death in 2004 that fracking became a subject the public discussed.  It came up as if the practice had recently been invented and applied.  Not hardly.