Water Problems in Oil Production — 1970 Oilfield Engineering Manual

Long before “produced water” became a major environmental and engineering issue, petroleum operators were already confronting an inconvenient fact: oil wells don't produce only oil.

Published in Tulsa in 1970, L. C. Case's Water Problems in Oil Production is a practical technical manual devoted to the water encountered during petroleum extraction and the engineering problems it created. The book addresses an overlooked side of twentieth-century oil production—the management, treatment and disposal of the enormous quantities of saline and contaminated water brought to the surface alongside hydrocarbons.

The manual became a recognized technical reference. It appears in contemporary environmental and groundwater literature, including work concerned with brine disposal and the possibility of contamination from oil and gas operations. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cited Case's book in its early work on brine-disposal practices in the petroleum industry.

That makes this more than an obsolete operating manual. It documents a period when the environmental consequences of petroleum production were becoming increasingly difficult to separate from the industry's engineering problems. By the early 1970s, government and scientific literature was explicitly examining oilfield brines, underground disposal and their potential effects on water resources.

Today, the book serves as a historical artifact of petroleum engineering and the evolving understanding of the environmental footprint created by fossil-fuel extraction.

Details: L. C. Case. Water Problems in Oil Production: An Operator's Manual. The Petroleum Publishing Co., Tulsa, Oklahoma. Copyright 1970. ISBN 0-87814-001-8. Hardcover. Made in USA.

Condition: Vintage hardcover in very good overall condition based on the photographed pages, with minor age and shelf wear. See photographs for the exact condition of this copy.