Salt Creek Oil Field facts for kids

Dutch Well No. 1, 1908, in Salt Creek Oil Field

The Salt Creek Oil Field is a very important place in Natrona County, Wyoming. By 1970, this oil field had produced more oil than any other in the Rocky Mountains region. It even made up 20 percent of all the oil produced in Wyoming!

People knew about natural oil seeps (where oil leaks out of the ground) in this area before 1880. Later, oil was found near a place called Lander, which led to more people wanting to find oil here. In 1889, the very first oil well was drilled in the Shannon area by Philip M. Shannon. He was the president of a company called Pennsylvania Oil & Gas. In 1895, he built an oil refinery in Casper to turn the crude oil into useful products. In 1906, a geologist named Dr. Porro, who worked for a Dutch company, found a good spot for a new well. This well, called Dutch No. 1, was drilled in 1908. It was a "gusher," meaning oil shot out of the ground with great force! It hit oil after drilling through about 300 meters (1,000 feet) of shale rock.

In 1915, a part of the area known as Teapot Dome was set aside as Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 3. This meant it was a special area for the U.S. Navy to store oil for future use.

How the Oil Formed

The Salt Creek oil field sits on a special underground rock structure called an anticline. Imagine a giant blanket that has been folded into a big arch – that's kind of what an anticline looks like underground. This arch is about 450 meters (1,500 feet) high. This structure formed a long, long time ago, in the Late Cretaceous or Early Tertiary periods.

The anticline has two main "domes," which are like two separate hills underground. The northern one is called "Salt Creek Dome," and the southern one is the famous "Teapot Dome". The oil is found in different layers of rock, like the Lakota, Sundance, and Tensleep formations. It's also found in two layers of the Frontier Formation, which are sandy layers that used to be offshore bars (like sandbanks in the ocean). These sandy layers are mixed with layers of marine shale, which are rocks formed from mud on the seafloor. The second Frontier formation even extends into the Teapot Dome to the south. These Frontier layers are found between the Mowry Shale and Niobrara Formation rock layers.

• 

  Salt Creek Oil Field Stratigraphy

• 

  Shannon Oil Pool in Salt Creek Oil Field

• 

  Geological section of Salt Creek Oil Field

Getting More Oil Out

To get even more oil out of the Salt Creek field, a method called Enhanced Oil Recovery is used. This involves injecting CO₂ (carbon dioxide) into the ground. The CO₂ helps push more oil out of the rocks, making it easier to collect. This CO₂ comes from a natural gas facility in a nearby area called LaBarge.

In 2016, some CO₂ was found to be leaking from an old, unused well in the field. This led to a local school being temporarily closed to make sure everyone was safe.

Images for kids

• 

  Dutch Well No. 1, 1908, in Salt Creek Oil Field