China has a long history of using oil. But from now on, in ancient times, the use of oil was actually mainly the part of oil (such as oil seedlings) that leaked from underground crude oil to the ground. Later, it developed into drilling wells (the principle is somewhat similar to that in rural areas), especially in Sichuan Province, China. In the Qing Dynasty, China drilled the deepest well in the world at that time, with the depth exceeding 1000 meters. Of course, the main purpose of drilling wells in ancient Sichuan was to bring in natural gas to cook salt.

The modern petroleum industry began in 1859 in the eastern United States.

L drake began to drill the first well in Pennsylvania. At that time, the main method was to drill wells with drilling rigs, which was very similar to the method of drilling natural gas wells in Sichuan, China. At that time, the conditions of the oil wells drilled were relatively good, mainly because the buried depth was shallow, usually only a few hundred meters. It seems that the famous spindle top oil field in the United States blew out when it hit more than 75 meters, but none of the wells developed in Yumen oil field in China were very deep.

The main way to develop oil fields in the early stage is to use the energy of the reservoir itself for self-injection production (now called primary oil recovery). This is mainly because the physical properties of the oilfield were very good at that time and the general formation energy was also very high. At that time, there were no logging, oil testing and acidizing and fracturing methods. Imagine that if the well drilled at that time was not injected with oil or the output was very low, it would basically be impossible to mine, and there was no way to mine at that time.