No. 3, 2008
Prof. Viktor Karpov ,
Dr. Sc. (History)
ENGINEER BYSTRITSKY’S GUSHER
The very first field in the Western-Siberian oil- and gas-bearing province was discovered 55 years ago
The history of the Western-Siberian oil and gas complex features many outstanding and momentous events. A special place among them belongs to the Beryozovo gas blowout of 1953, which confirmed the hypothesis that Western Siberia had colossal hydrocarbon reserves to become the country's chief fuel base in the last quarter of the 20th century.
The hard-won oil wealth of Western Siberia
After the end of World War II, the Tyumen Region remained a blind spot geologically. Its territory had been poorly explored owing to the remoteness of the geologically most promising areas - the circumpolar and arctic parts of the Urals - from the main communication routes, as well as to the paucity and fragmentation of prospecting work. Exploration was conducted by the Urals and Novosibirsk branches of the USSR Academy of Sciences which actually put very little effort in the study of the Tyumen Region.
The decision to resume geological prospecting for oil and gas in Western Siberia was made after a careful study of the exploration materials obtained in the 1930s and 1940s. The need for such prospecting was stressed in a resolution of the Oil and Gas Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences Presidium and in the recommendations of the First Session of the Academy's Western-Siberian branch in 1945. In January 1948, the USSR Ministry of Geology decided to organize oil-prospecting expeditions in Novosibirsk and Tyumen, which were to sink key wells in what are now the Tyumen and Tomsk regions. A plan for the exploration of the territories, elaborated under the guidance of Prof. N.N. Rostovtsev, a geologist from Leningrad, was endorsed in 1950.
Convincing evidence of the presence of commercial oil reserves there was long in coming, owing to the territory's exploration immaturity, limited material, technical and human resources of Tyumen geologists and previous wildcatting. Right from the start of oil and gas prospecting, drilling operations all but paralleled geophysical exploration. Wells were sunk based on tentative geophysical data which quite often proved erroneous. As a result, not a single oil or gas field had been discovered on the 55 exploration areas in Siberia and the Far East by the year 1953. Therefore, the question arose whether it was expedient to continue the search any further.
A historic event at Beryozovo
Only the discovery of commercial reserves in the region could drive on and scale up exploration work. A gas well that blew out in September 1953 in the Beryozovo district of the Khanty-Mansi area of the Tyumen Region did just that.
Originally, the test drilling plan provided for sinking a well (which later on ushered in the discovery of the world's largest Western-Siberian oil and gas province) somewhere off the town of Beryozovo standing on the bank of a small taiga river of Kazym, a right tributary of the Ob. However, that point proved to be inaccessible to the lumber carriers of the Irtysh Shipping Company which brought all cargoes from Tyumen to the northern areas. So the geologists decided to move the future well site two kilometers closer to the outskirts of Beryozovo which had a hithe, a road and sources of water supply and building materials. The drilling superintendent, engineer Alexander Bystritsky, considered the moving of the key hole quite acceptable for doing the job assigned to his crew.
The drilling rig was set up in just two months - a record time for such work in the conditions of the north. Drilling operations began on September 29, 1952, but on July 23, 1953, specialists decided to suspend the R-1 well on the Beryozovo site, considering that its geological mission had been accomplished. The mission of a key hole is to study the geological structure of the site, but geologists always hope that the drillmen would eventually strike oil or gas. Since the well in question was considered barren and no surprises were expected, the crew neglected certain rules. For instance, they conducted tests with an open bottom hole, taking no precautions against the well going out of control and producing a spontaneous blowout.
The records of Glavtyumengeologia in the Public archives of the Tyumen Region and the Beryozovo archives preserve a document entitled "A report on the gas blowout at the R?1 Beryozovo key well." The document, which had been sent to Tyumen by wire, said: "We, the undersigned, party chief Grigory Surkov, acting chief geologist T.N. Pastukhova, drillman V.N. Melnikov, rig mechanic G.F. Kovtun and the drilling crew comprising Mezhetskikh, Provodnikov, Yakovlev, Korikov and Yansufin, have drawn up this report to certify that on September 21, 1953, at 21 hours 30 minutes, just as the drilling tools were being lifted at the R?1 Beryozovo key well following the drilling out of cement plugs, there occurred a spontaneous gas and water blowout. Ejected from the well were 200 meters of 5'' drilling pipes as well as a drilling bit. The gusher was 40 or 50 meters high." It was the first time in the history of geological prospecting in the Siberian Urals area that such a powerful gas and water gusher had struck from a key hole 1,305 meters deep. It put a stop to the argument of scientists on the prospects of Siberia's oil industry: since there was gas there, there should be oil there, too. And it was precisely oil that was being looked for: for a long time, the importance of natural gas was underrated in the Soviet Union.
The breakdown and the discovery occurred at one and the same time. Initially, that was a rather frequent occurrence in the north of the Tyumen Region owing to a lack of technology and experience. However, there also was an ardent desire to attain positive results as soon as possible. Reports of uncontrolled blowouts were always unexpected and, in the words of Tyumen's chief geologist, Yuri Ervye, they always signified a disaster. "I don't know how others react to this," he wrote, "but I myself am always deeply shaken by reports of uncontrolled gas blowouts or oil gushers." According to people's recollections, the Beryozovo gas blowout caused fear, confusion and jubilation at one and the same time. Many welcomed the long-awaited discovery.
But confusion predominated at first, for in the austere natural conditions of the north it was very difficult to stop any open flow. This meant very hard times to the inhabitants of Beryozovo: people were afraid to use their stoves lest an explosion should occur. Steamship and airplane services stopped functioning. A continuous buzz over the town made it impossible to talk out in the street. Many families were getting ready to leave elsewhere. The wellhead was closed only in February 1954.
Later on many specialists regarded engineer Bystritsky's arbitrary moving the drillsite to Beryozovo without consulting his higher-ups as a lucky strike: as it turned out, the original site of the key well on the Kazym lay beyond the gas-bearing area. In his memoirs, Yuri Ervye wrote: "It was enough for Bystritsky to follow his instructions closely and there would have been no discovery - as this had happened all over Western Siberia where the drilling of highly expensive key wells had been planned. Thus, in 1956 for instance, the R-10 well drilled at the spot where it had been planned yielded nothing but water." Bystritsky himself (who had been suspended for the arbitrary moving of the drillsite and was returned to Beryozovo only after the blowout was stopped) disagreed with the "dumb luck" theory: indeed, there were plenty of documents proving that the search conducted by Tyumen geologists was purposeful. True, the prospecting operations were poorly organized. Apart from the dispersion of prospecting crews and the absence of roads, in 1952 the Tyumen geologists received almost no support in the form of motor vehicles, building materials and spare parts, which resulted in wells standing idle for months. Alexander Bystritsky later recalled: "To resume work we had to ask other organizations to lend us fuel and lubricants. Before long, our crew was in debt to everybody with no prospect of recovery. We were still badly in need of everything."
New discoveries
Although greater attention was paid to the Tyumen area after 1953, there were still enough specialists who were skeptical about its prospects. In 1957, the USSR State Planning Committee evaluated the expected reserves of oil and gas in all of the country's explored and potential oil- and gas-bearing provinces. According to that evaluation, the expected reserves of oil and gas in Western Siberia were four times smaller than the figure arrived at by local specialists. In other words, the high officials refused to believe in the tremendous potential of the West-Siberian lowland. Some researchers and executives regarded the Beryozovo gusher as a purely local phenomenon. However, following the Beryozovo blowout, the prospecting operations in the region were radically restructured both in terms of scale and location. Whereas prior to 1953 most of the exploration work was confined to the populated and easily accessible southern parts of the West-Siberian lowland, the discovery of gas reserves in Beryozovo prompted specialists to pay closer attention to its northern regions. The second half of the 1950s marked the turning point in the evaluation of the oil and gas potential of Western Siberia.
The country mobilized its material and scientific resources to create a new fuel base of national importance and scaled up geological prospecting for oil and gas. In 1960, the volume of drilling operations was nearly twice as large as that of the 1954-1955 period. As a result, new gas fields were discovered, and on June 21, 1960, a long-awaited oil gusher struck in the village of Shaim. Siberia's first commercial oil field was discovered by the drilling team led by the foreman Semyon Urusov. In 1961, oil gushers went up in the vicinity of Megion and Ust-Balyk. Whereas the Shaim district lies closer to the Urals, the Megion and Ust-Balyk oil fields are in the center of Western Siberia. While the oil of Shaim undermined the positions of skeptics, the comparatively small reserves of Jurassic oil did not yet mean that the land of Tyumen was an "oil giant." The oil of thick and easily traced Cretaceous deposits of the Ob basin made it possible to appraise highly the significance of the entire region. After that specialists began talking about the discovery of the country's new oil-bearing province. Five more oil deposits were discovered by the end of 1961. Thus the prediction of Academician Ivan Gubkin, a prominent Soviet scientist, concerning large reserves of oil in Siberia, was confirmed after decades of exploration work, accompanied by failures and disappointments.
In 1965, declined prospecting efficiency in the Beryozovo gas-bearing area and the successes scored by geologists in the Arctic area prompted Glavtyumengeologia officials to move to the north some of the expeditions and teams which had previously worked in the south of the Khanty-Mansi Area. The Narykar expedition was sent to Urengoi and the Kazym expedition - to Nadym. "So many crews have worked in Beryozovo for such a long time," Viktor Podshibyakin, an industry old-timer and Hero of Socialist Labor, commented in an interview to the press in May 1966. "All told," he said, "we have saved 185 billion cubic meters of gas there. However, the historic significance of Beryozovo lies in the fact that it was the first such field."
That was how the great Siberian oil epic began - from a gas blowout in Beryozovo. In April 1965, the USSR State Geological Committee unreservedly declared the West-Siberian lowland the country's largest oil- and gas-bearing province which was even far more promising in oil and gas reserves than the Volga-Urals area.
