These partners looked to apply outside technology to the oil and gas business, and RMOTC staff helped identify how that would work and assisted in designing tests. The second type were mom-and-pop type inventors with good ideas but little experience in the energy business. One type-primarily academia and industry-brought lab-based innovation into the RMOTC working oilfield for testing. The center worked with two kinds of partners. To collaborators, the RMOTC offered core professional staff with years of experience in energy fields. RMOTC was highly successful in partnering with industry, academia and inventors in testing hundreds of technologies and transferring them to the public. Geothermal, wind, solar, carbon management, gas leak detection and water management were also tested at the Teapot Dome Oilfield. RMOTC was the only site in the country dedicated to this research and included environmental and renewable energy testing. For nearly two decades, RMOTC officials used the reserve as a commercial testing ground primarily for new technologies and processes designed to improve drilling, oil production and enhanced oil recovery-retrieving oil from old wells, sometimes called stripper wells, that resisted conventional pumping methods. In 1993, Teapot Dome became the home of the DOE’s Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center (RMOTC), a partnership among DOE, academia and private industry. President Barack Obama eventually authorized an additional three-year extension prior to disposition of the oilfield to a private buyer.Ī plunge in oil prices in the mid-1980s led the major oil companies to reduce research and development budgets and concentrate on overseas activities, leaving a large void in oilfield R&D, which the Department of Energy was well positioned to fill. Bush once, President Clinton three times and President George W. President Reagan authorized continued production three times, President George H.W. Production peaked at 4,400 barrels per day in 1980 but eventually declined to approximately 600 barrels per day by 1999, despite use of various secondary and enhanced oil recovery technologies.Ĭongress, in 1976, had declared that the Naval Petroleum Reserves be developed and produced at their maximum efficient rates for 6 years and authorized the President to extend production in 3-year increments based on investigations of the necessity for continued production. DOE officials decided to develop the field, and in 1978, Fenix and Scisson, Inc. 3-was transferred from the Navy to the newly formed U.S. In 1977, jurisdiction for the Teapot Dome Oilfield-still officially Naval Petroleum Reserve No. In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed into law the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act, and full production at Teapot Dome Oilfield began again. ![]() ![]() Through the 1950s and 1960s, apart from the drilling of some exploratory and drainage-protection wells and conducting geological surveys, the field remained essentially closed.īut then came the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 with its oil shortages and skyrocketing gasoline prices. 1 at Elk Hills in California was sufficient-and available quickly enough-to meet the Navy’s demand. Teapot Dome was not developed when oil demand skyrocketed during World War II oil from Naval Petroleum Reserve No. Navy stopped production in the field, preferring instead to maintain its oil reserves in the ground.īetween 19, little activity occurred at the field other than quarterly pressure testing of five designated wells. Secretary Albert Fall was convicted in 1929, and around that time the U.S. secretary of the Interior for taking bribes.īut the history of the oilfield since that time makes an interesting case study of a public-private partnership covering eight and a half decades of the oil business in the United States. The notorious Teapot Dome Oilfield generally disappears from history books after the scandal of the 1920s ended in the imprisonment of a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Fossil Energy. Editor's note: This article was written by Carolynne Harris, consultant, in collaboration with and for the U.S.
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