Hugh Roy Cullen

American oilman and industrialist, born in 1881 in Denton County, Texas, and died in 1957 in Houston. Cullen entered the petroleum business in 1915 and became known for a distinctive geological approach to drilling salt dome oil fields, targeting the flanks of a dome rather than its center where earlier drillers had repeatedly failed. This method produced his breakthrough discovery at the Pierce Junction field within the Houston city limits, where his well came in at 2500 barrels a day, and he repeated the technique at the Blue Ridge Dome, where flank wells produced 60,000 barrels daily, and at the Humble Field, where he drilled through problematic shale to reach oil bearing sand beneath it. Cullen's flank drilling method opened up salt dome fields across the Texas Gulf Coast that conventional drilling had left undeveloped or judged exhausted.