Early Drill Rig with Steam Engine The land around Amarillo was a surprise to me: very agricultural. There are grain elevators everywhere and lots of irrigation from the Ogallala aquifer. It’s the wrong time of the year to see exactly what grain they are growing, probably corn, perhaps wheat. As we head south the crop changed to cotton. The stems are bare now, but some remaining cotton balls are stuck on the branches. Finally, as we approached Midland, the land changed again – to Mesquite trees and oil wells.
Our major stop for the day was the Petroleum museum. Here they give you the full story of how they drill for oil: using instruments to map the underground formations, exploratory wells where it looks promising (less than 5% find enough oil for production; production wells and the techniques to get the oil out of the ground, and finally the maintenance process and secondary and tertiary techniques to gain more oil. Actually, we found the Panhandle and Plains Museum in Canyon to be more interesting than this museum. While they had some good audio/visual displays, I felt overwhelmed with minute information.
