No. 2, 2009

Much of the history of Russia’s oil industry is represented in the collection of St. Petersburg’s Mining Museum

Russia's Northern Capital, St. Petersburg, is widely known for its museums, many of which are world-famous. Among these, a special place is held by the Mining Museum of St. Petersburg's State Mining Institute, one of the world's best museums of geology, mining, and metallurgy. And, among its most highly-rated exhibits, pride of place is taken by the artefacts testifying to the great importance and rich history of Russia's oil industry.

In the beginning, there was drilling

The story of how the model collection at the Mining Museum at St. Petersburg's State Mining Institute (Technical University) came to be dates back to the reign of Catherine II. In terms of scale, historical treasures, and quality of exhibits, the museum's collection of models, mock-ups, and specimens of mining and metallurgical hardware from the 18th-20th centuries has no equal either in Russia or the world. The collection includes approximately 600 rare showpieces, gathered together under the thematic categories of Drilling, Mining, Mining Machinery, Engines, Dressing, Metallurgy, and Metalworking.

In the Drilling section, one can see Russian-made drilling equipment of the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibits include drilling tools from the Stroganov salt mines, a drilling tool designed by the mining engineer Sigizmund Voislav, drilling rigs from the Baku oil fields of the late 19th century, and one of the first domestically-produced diamond drilling tools designed by Captain Borovsky.

In November 2007, three models of the oil well drilling rigs kept at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute's Mining Museum were awarded certificates as category I monuments to science and technology. Such high status was previously enjoyed only by full-scale models of equipment, but in recent years the Expert Council of the International Council of Museums has revised its attitude toward mechanical models and mock-ups. It is now clear that future generations will have to see smaller copies of full-scale mechanical devices, which are often impossible to keep in museums because of their size.

Some of the models at the Mining Museum represent the Baku oil well drilling rigs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which at that time brought renown to Russia's oil industry. Each of these rigs can tell us something about the history of the country's first oil fields, and they are associated with the biographies of some famous people - industrialists, engineers, and mechanical geniuses. The models are made in 1:4 and 1:8 scales, and reproduce exactly the construction and outward appearance of the rigs. They are also capable of demonstrating how the life-size rigs operated.

It was at the Baku oil fields that oil was produced in industrial quantities for the first time in Russian history. The intensive development of the oil fields on the Apsheron Peninsula began after the leasing system then in force was abolished in 1872. Based on the results of a tender, 48 oil-bearing lots measuring 27 acres each were transferred to private entrepreneurs under long-term leases. The first wells were drilled using foreign rigs imported from Galicia and the United States, but the geological conditions turned out to be too complex for such equipment. Since the expensive foreign rigs broke down often, the entrepreneurs soon began actively hiring native-born engineers and mechanics to build drilling rigs that were suited to the complex geological conditions of the region.

The Baku Oil Company (BOC), Russia's first vertically-integrated company, was created in 1874 on the basis of the Transcaucasian Trading Partnership. Among the founders of the BOC was the prominent industrialist and entrepreneur Vasily Kokorev (1817-1889). The BOC was one of the first to drill a well on the Apsheron Peninsula, thereby developing the oil riches of the Balakhany-Sabunchi petroliferous formation. Encountering great difficulties in using foreign drill rigs, as did other Baku firms, the BOC took an active part in developing new models of domestically-produced drilling equipment.

Drillmasters

Of the three rigs on display in the Mining Museum, the BOC drilling rig is the simplest in design. It is a balanced type of the Baku rig, designed for spudding on sinkers with free-falling tools. Dubbed "the Baku method," this became the main style of drilling used in the Baku oil fields between 1870 and 1910.

The BOC rig is closest in design to the well-known Molot (Hammer) rig, but has a less durable frame and a more primitive rocker assembly. The exact date of the rig's construction is unknown, but it most likely was developed in the second half of the 1880s. The operating model of the BOC rig is the sole reproduction of one of the earliest Baku drilling rigs to be found in Russia.

Despite its still imperfect construction, this rig was successfully used right down to the end of the 19th century. It was donated to the Mining Museum after the Russian Exhibition of Art and Industry, held in Nizhny Novgorod between 1896 and 1898. Once there, it was put on display alongside models of derricks, bailers, and tools used in drilling wells and pumping oil out of the ground.

If the cable spudder was the dominant rig during the first years of the Baku oil fields' development, the rod spudder was to become the main rig by the middle of the 1880s. Russian-made balanced spudders of various designs were mainly used. The rod spudders' main shortcoming was that their parts wore out quickly under the heavy spudding loads. The design of the Baku spudders was gradually upgraded to the point where not only were the mechanisms and their components improved, but the rigs' resistance to their spudding loads as well.

Built in the workshops of the Baku Technical College at the beginning of the 20th century, the so-called Mukhtarov Licensed Rig allows visitors to become acquainted with one of the best domestically-produced drilling rigs created at the Baku oil fields during the pre-Revolution period. The rig was designed by a drilling master by the name of Gorchakov, who worked for the industrialist Murtuza Mukhtarov, the latter also taking part in design work. It was while they were working to perfect the Molot rig that the Mukhtarov rig was first produced. This rig was followed by an improved version that was awarded License No. 1997-8 in 1895.

A comparison of the models of the two rigs - the BOC and the Mukhtarov - allows one to clearly visualize the process followed in perfecting the Baku drilling hardware during the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

The Mukhtarov drilling rig was designed for the mechanical spudding of oil wells. Its main distinguishing characteristics were the great durability of its frame and basic mechanisms, its resistance to heavy spudding loads, and its well thought-out design in the area of preventing worker-related accidents. The rig was widely used at the Baku oil fields right down to the 1930s, and was even exported to the Dutch East Indies.

Murtuza Mukhtarov (1855-1920), the founder of the Baku oil firm M. Mukhtarov & Co., was born into a poor family in the village of Amiradzhany, not far from Baku, where they worked transporting cartloads of crude from the oil fields to the local kerosene refineries. In 1870, he began working as an oil field laborer and in time moved up from being a simple digger to the position of drilling master. A talented and ambitious young man, he taught himself Russian, studied the necessary technical literature, learned to draw, and with time became a highly qualified mechanic. For a time, he headed the machine shop at the Martov oil fields, and opened his own company in 1890.

Mukhtarov's firm tendered for drilling work, and was engaged in the repair and assembly of drilling rigs and tools. The site of Mukhtarov's oil lots was near the port of Sabunchi and is now called Mukhtarovka. At the end of the 1890s, Mukhtarov built Russia's first specialized industrial enterprise for the production of oil industry equipment at Bibi-Eibat. The transformation of a small machine building shop into one of Russia's largest drilling equipment factories was made easier by the great popularity of the Mukhtarov rig: very durable and hardwearing, it allowed the drilling of wells with depths as great as 1,000 to 1,100 meters.

Mukhtarov's firm operated not only in Baku, but in the oil fields of Maykop and Grozny as well. By the start of the World War I, he had amassed a huge fortune and was well-known for his charity work. The children of Zelim-Khan, the notorious rebel leader executed by the tsarist government, were raised in Mukhtarov's family, as was the future famous opera star Fatima Mukhtarova. Mukhtarov combined a tremendous sense of hard work and enterprise with a rare courage and pride, which eventually brought him to a tragic end. In 1920, he refused to submit to the Bolshevik government's orders on the nationalization of the oil industry, barricaded himself in his villa, and - after killing two Red Army soldiers - was shot during an attempt to arrest him.

Inventions of Otto Lenz

Along with the two balanced spudding rig models, the Mining Museum is also home to a model of a Lenz unbalanced cable spudder, displayed together with a selection of drilling tools, a mock-up of an oil well, and the upper part of a derrick. The creation of this drilling equipment is associated with the name of one of Baku's first mechanics, Otto Lenz, who drilled the very first Baku oil wells as early as the 1860s and invented the balanced Lenz rig in 1874. Despite its bulk, the balanced Lenz rig was very popular among members of the oil industry. Otto Lenz worked hard to encourage the development of Russia's oil production by offering his rigs on credit, with the subsequent payment taken out of the money made from the sale of oil from the new wells. In his article "Oil," the well-known Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleyev talks about the prominent role Lenz played in the development of Baku oil drilling.

For more than a quarter century, Otto Lenz himself worked as a drilling master on new wells around Baku. He was one of the organizers of the Baku Branch of the Imperial Russian Technical Society (BBIRTS) and took an active part in it until 1888. Among Lenz's inventions were one of the first oil burner nozzles and an original design for a well reamer. It should be noted that the latter of these inventions, executed together with Richard Zorge (the father of a famous Soviet secret service man), a mechanic at the Nobel Brothers' Oil Production Partnershp, won high praise from the Austrian engineer Fauch, Europe's most respected drilling specialist, in 1889.

Most Baku firms used the spudder method for drilling oil wells, employing balanced rigs and free-falling tools, just as it was done in many regions of Europe. Drilling methods like this, which allowed only slow progress to be made (40-150 cm per day), also put great impact loads on the rigs and demanded enormous quantities of metal well casings. "The ideal toward which all the technicians of Europe had been striving was the application of free-falling tools to cable drilling. Many clever attempts were made, but not one of them achieved success," Fauch wrote.

Only Otto Lenz succeeded in developing and introducing such a method of drilling. In the 1890s, he successfully began drilling oil wells using the cable spudder method, employing the new unbalanced rig and a free-falling tool (Freifall) of his own design.

Lenz's Freifall was the first automatic free-falling tool to be created at the Baku oil fields. In his design, Lenz was the first to include a thrust cage for turning the tool automatically. The steel cable from which the drilling tool hung was controlled with the help of a special pulley block, also designed by Lenz.

His contemporaries considered the "Lenz method" to be a completely different method of drilling. The engineer Nikolay Lavrov wrote that "Lenz's device is very good and operates at an acceptable speed in certain soils, which have little or no viscosity, but it has not achieved universal popularity and is not being used by all, since getting by without weights is not possible everywhere."

A model of an unbalanced Lenz rig, along with a mock-up of a drilled well, a drilling tool, and an 1:8 scale derrick, was donated to the Mining Museum by the Partnership of S.M. Shibayev & Co., one of Baku's oldest oil firms, between 1884 and 1898. These items were on display at the 1896 Russian Exhibition of Art and Industry in Nizhny Novgorod, and at other exhibitions as well.

The museum's collection allows one to follow the evolution of mining and metallurgy from their beginnings to this day. Alongside the three drilling rigs, the Mining Museum is home to a wide collection of models of the drilling tools used in the Baku oil fields, donated by the Baku Oil Company and the Nobel Brothers' Oil Production Partnership. They include drillbits, Freifalls, an emergency tool, and well operating equipment.