Oil well fires are oil or gas wells that have caught on fire and burn. They can be the result of accidents, arson, or natural events, such as lightning. They can exist on a small scale, such as an oil field spill catching fire, or on a huge scale, as in geyser-like jets of flames from ignited high pressure wells. A frequent cause of a well fire is a high-pressure blowout during drilling operations.

Extinguishing

Oil well fires are more difficult to extinguish than regular fires due to the enormous fuel supply for the fire. In fighting a fire at a wellhead, typically high explosives, such as dynamite, are used to create a shockwave that pushes the burning fuel and local atmospheric oxygen away from a well. (This is a similar principle to blowing out a candle.) The flame is removed and the fuel can continue to spill out without catching fire. After blowing out the fire, the wellhead must be capped to stop the flow of oil. During this time, copious fuel and oxygen are present; any spark or other heat source might ignite a fire worse than the original blowout. Thus brass tools, bronze tools, or paraffin wax-coated tools – which do not strike sparks – are used in capping. In essence, the trade was started by Myron M. Kinley, who dominated the field in the early years. His lieutenant, Red Adair, went on to become the most famous of oil well firefighters. Some of the technology used by Red Adair to seal some of the Kuwait oil fires without re-igniting the flow of oil, originated in a patent by John R. Duncan (United States Patent 3,108,499 filed September 28, 1960, granted October 29,1963), a method and apparatus for severing section of fluid pipeline therefrom. The patent was granted a year after Red Adair's success in combating the Devil's Cigarette Lighter gas well fire. The invention is concerned with removing a section of a fluid pipeline and inserting a valve or other component therein without destroying line pressure and without losing any significant amount of fluid passing through the pipeline. There are several techniques used to put out oil well fires, which vary by resources available and the characteristics of the fire itself. With recent advances in technology as well as environmental concerns, many straightforward well fires today are capped while they burn. Techniques include:

Effects

Oil well fires can cause the loss of millions of barrels of crude oil per day. Combined with the ecological problems caused by the large amounts of smoke and unburnt petroleum falling back to earth, oil well fires such as those seen in Kuwait in 1991 can cause enormous economic losses. Smoke from burnt crude oil contains many chemicals, including sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, soot, benzopyrene, Poly aromatic hydrocarbons, and dioxins. Exposure to oil well fires is commonly cited as a cause of the Gulf War Syndrome, however, studies have indicated that the firemen who capped the wells did not report any of the symptoms suffered by the soldiers.

Notable occurrences