text: History Around 1891, the first submerged oil wells were drilled from platforms built on piles in the fresh waters of the Grand Lake St. Marys in Ohio.  The wells were developed by small local companies such as Bryson, Riley Oil, German-American and Banker's Oil.
  Around 1896, the first submerged oil wells in salt water were drilled in the portion of the Summerland field extending under the Santa Barbara Channel in California.  The wells were drilled from piers extending from land out into the channel.
  Other notable early submerged drilling activities occurred on the Canadian side of Lake Erie in the 1900s and Caddo Lake in Louisiana in the 1910s.  Shortly thereafter wells were drilled in tidal zones along the Texas and Louisiana gulf coast.  The Goose Creek Oil Field near Baytown, Texas is one such example.  In the 1920s drilling activities occurred from concrete platforms in Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo.
  One of the oldest subsea wells is the Bibi Eibat well, which came on stream in 1923 in Azerbaijan.  The well was located on an artificial island in a shallow portion of the Caspian Sea.  In the early 1930s, the Texas Company developed the first mobile steel barges for drilling in the brackish coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico.
  In 1937, Pure Oil and its partner Superior Oil used a fixed platform to develop a field  offshore of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana in  of water.