Abstract

Prospecting for oil and gas in the Mid-Continent has taken place in three distinct stages. The three processes have frequently overlapped, and are in fact, in concurrent use even today. From about the time of the Civil War to early in the twentieth century, most of the exploration was confined to random drilling, drilling near seeps, or drilling in lowlands. Structural geology was applied to oil finding as early as 1904 in southern Oklahoma and was given great Impetus with the discovery of the Cushing field and other large anticlinal accumulations. Surface mapping techniques dominated the industry until the early 1930s when it became general knowledge that even larger oil fields, such as the East Texas field, were in stratigraphic traps. The Mid-Continent has an abundant supply of such traps, in lensing sands, pinchouts, buried beaches and channels, and truncated sandstones. Attention swung to the concentrated application of subsurface geologic techniques. in the 1950s, several students pointed out a serious lack of knowledge of the deltaic environment. Stratigraphers soon began to fill this gap and the Mid-Continent geologist was quick to apply the new-found knowledge.

Many tools and techniques were first applied in the Mid-Continent. Reflection seismology scored its first definite success near Oklahoma City in 1921; today's sophisticated use of the seismograph in stratigraphic analysis is an outgrowth of that early experiment. Plate tectonics, in spite of the general lack of knowledge of Paleozoic events, can be successfully applied to the solution of Mid-Continent problems.

The comment is frequently heard that the Mid-Continent is a dying province, long since past its prime. Yet every day brings news of new discoveries and some basins and subprovinces remain virtually unexplored. There is still more oil to be found.