The drill rig: a history lesson: the first wells were drilled to get water and brine. Then in 1859, an explorer hit oil and the modern petroleum industry was born.

The people who drill oil and gas wells are pushing the edges of technology toward an exotic future when robotic tractors will drill underground oil wells and drillers on the surface will steer their drill bits in real time to small pockets of oil and gas thousands of feet below the surface.

The oil field of the future will be to tally unlike anything today, with multitudes of wells feeding into one borehole to the surface, and even oil and gas processing facilities miniaturized and installed below ground.

The future is not as far away as it might seem, and Alaskans in the business are right in the middle of this wave of innovation.

Concepts and systems invented and developed in the North Slope oil fields are being spread around the world. Alaska's big oil fields have become a proving ground for advanced technologies invented elsewhere, too.

THE MODERN WELL

The industry has come a long way since Col. Edwin Drake drilled the first modern oil well in 1859 at Titusville, Pa.

Drake could never have imagined wells drilled at steep angles to reach a small oil or gas deposit several miles from the surface location of the drill rig, or drilled horizontally to drain thin, flat layers of oil saturated rock. He could not have conceived of zero discharge wells where all the waste from the well-fluids used in drilling, rocks and cuttings from the hole--are reinjected underground and not kept on the surface.

Today, there are truck-mounted drill rigs capable of drilling deep holes, coiled tubing units that drilled wells without drill rigs, and multi-lateral wells, or several wells drilled underground from one well to the surface.

These are being done routinely today in the North Slope and Cook Inlet oil fields. Horizontal drilling and multilateral wells were invented in Alaska. Another new technology, real-time steering of the drill bit …