Oil Wells in the Florida Keys
News from the 1950s.
Over 300 oil wells, including a number in Monroe County, had been drilling in Florida over 60 years. In 1939, a 10,000-foot well was drilled at Pinecrest in the Everglades part of Monroe County. None of the wells had produced enough oil to be commercially viable.
Between 1943 and 1962, 14 exploratory oil wells were drilled in the vicinity of the Florida Keys. Gulf Oil drilled the first offshore Florida oil exploration well in 1955 (or maybe 1959), in state waters in Florida Bay south of Cape Sable, Monroe County.
Prior to being designated a National Marine Sanctuary in 1990, reefs in the vicinity of the Florida Keys were drilled in the search for oil. Hydrocarbons are being produced from Lower Cretaceous limestone, anhydrite, and dolomite that compose the Sunniland Formation of Florida (Winston 1969, 1972). Seventeen exploratory wells were drilled in south and central Florida and in the keys beginning at about the time oil was discovered at the Sunniland Field in 1943 (Fig. 2.2; Dustan et al. 1991). All wells had oil shows, but no show was economically viable. All wells left magnetic signatures due to borehole casing.
Most offshore well sites evolved into ‘artificial reefs’ as sessile organisms colonized discarded wires and casings, and great numbers of fish congregated in borehole cavities that formed havens in otherwise feature-less seafloor sites (Shinn et al. 1989a, 1993). Conclusions drawn from the well-site studies were that none of the environments sustained permanent biological damage during the one-time perturbations of drilling, even to depths of several thousand meters, and that the biological impact was negligible. Conclusions could not be drawn from those studies for wells that would become producing wells with longer-term on-site perturbations.
In 1943 the first commercial oil well in Florida was established in Collier County and was shipping tank cars full of crude oil to refineries in New York and New Jersey. This first discovery of oil in Florida spurred Humble Oil to look for more. Over the next few decades, 14 oil discoveries were made in Southwest Florida. Eight of them were commercial oil fields, including Sunniland, an area just south of Immokalee.
A now-retired pump-jack stands as a monument in a patch of overgrown grass just off of State Road 29 between Immokalee and Everglades City. “That pump is representative of how Sunniland oil was produced for years,” Duncan said. “It represents a long span of time in Southwest Florida in terms of operating a piece of equipment that is representative of the industry.”
Today, one oil well in Sunniland, which is leased by BreitBurn Energy Partners, is still producing 30 barrels per day. Since the first discovery, 117 million barrels from commercial oil fields in the area have been filled, more than 18.5 million from Sunniland.
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