GAS column of 320 mm and then continued drilling and when they reached 280 m, there was a strong eruption of gas, and from an oil lamp, everything caught fire and the whole wooden spire burned down. Eventually, the eruption was steered laterally, they tubed the 279 mm column and rebuilt the spire. During this time they let the probe erupt freely for two and a half years, hoping that the flow rate would further decrease, as this amounted, according to measurements, to 900,000 cubic meters a day. It was the fourth largest probe in the world”, Ioan Gliga continued his story. After two and a half years of free discharge, they ordered the closing of the probe so as not to squander the rich deposit of gas. “The operation of closing the probe was especially difficult because no tubed column was cemented. For this reason, to be able to master the gases, a packer was introduced - a stopper made of gunny cloth, mounted on the 203 mm column, at a depth of 128 m, above which they poured cement to close it. Afterwards they mounted at the mouth of a well a shut-off cap. After the cement hardened, they mounted a shut-off cap. On 31 July 1911, the recorded pressure was 28
atmospheres”, Ioan Gliga summed up another operation from the beginning of the history of natural gas in Romania. Things didn’t stop here. After three months a great eruption of gas occurred through six craters formed from 70 up to 320 m east of the probe. Shortly afterwards, the gas caught fire from the lamp of a watchman. To reduce emanations from the craters, the probe was opened again, being left to freely erupt until it was coupled to the transport pipeline which was under construction.
An historic day The official date recorded in the sources of the time referring to the discovery of natural gas in Transylvania is 22 April 1909. This was 99% pure gas, methane, and the rest was oxygen, nitrogen and helium. The discovery of natural gas led to the development of the gas transport system. In the following period, the first pipeline SărmășelTurda-Ocna Mureş was built. After the Great Union of 1918, there began a laborious process of mapping the areas of Transylvania, the outcrops, there were highlighted the domes, the vaults, so that the drilling probes could be placed as close to the centre of the dome as possible. Wells were dug at Târnăveni, Sângeorgiu de Mureş, Zau de Câmpie, Şincai and in some other places in Transylvania, but all with negative results. Given this situation, there was a reorientation towards areas where there were recorded emanations of gas, wells being dug at Sărmaş - 9, Şincai - 2, Zau de Câmpie - 1 and
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on other structures from outside Mureș County, the vast majority intercepting gas deposits. Along the time, the evidence of each deposit was kept extremely strictly, as the two professionals have told us. “In all of the country’s structures, work began in October so as to present the situation to the Ministry on 1 January. You were supposed to present what you have discovered, the volume, how much had been extracted, which was the volume in the ground on 1 January. There were 38 horizontal sections and a few tens of thousands vertically”, as Ioan Gliga remembers.
An undesired profession To become a specialist in the natural gas industry took a long time and called for the completion of the training journey, stage by stage. There were no shortcuts and you could not become a good professional without having carried out hard work, in the field. “I would not accept an engineer becoming a leader without his having gone through the stage of drilling. It is an essential stage that enables one to see some phenomena that can be observed only by the probe, how they occur and how they can be solved, how one can adapt to the conditions outside, what it is like not to have a fixed program, but to have to stay there until they are solved. For me, who started drilling in 1962, until 1967, when they called me to the General Directorate, this was indeed a stage that meant introducing me in an area where work is of a different kind than we’d thought”, Ioan Gliga remembers. WWW.TRANSILVANIABUSINESS.RO