|
Dolar & Associates, Greyhound House, 23–24 George St., Richmond, Surrey TW9 IHY, UK
The documented history of systematic petroleum exploration in that part of southern Asia now known as Pakistan, see Fig. 1, is here divided into five stages.
In 1866 some seven or eight holes were dug in and around the seepages near Fatehjang, 25 miles west of Islamabad, yielding a few gallons of oil per day (Pascoe 1920). Then, in 1870, B. S. Lyitaan, an American from Pennsylvania was hired to investigate the oil prospects of the Punjab. His report is of special interest to a meeting on Classic Petroleum Provinces, since its maps were probably the first ever published on which subsurface structure was delineated by contours, Owen (1975). During the last quarter of the 19th Century there were sporadic attempts to drill shallow boreholes in the northern parts of the Central Fold Belt. This activity culminated in the drilling of thirteen wells at Kattan in the Marri Tribal Territory of northeast Baluchistan near oil seepages and from which 25 000 barrels of oil were produced between 1885 and 1892. The impetus for this drilling was to establish a convenient source of fuel for the railway system which the then Indian Government was constructing to help secure the Afghan/Indian border.
Immediately prior to World War I, various investment syndicates (mainly British financed) were formed to explore in the Punjab and it is from these origins that the first significant company was established on 1 December 1913 to acquire extensive exploration rights; The Attock Oil Company.
In 1915, oil was discovered in quantity at
...
This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
