Red Adair
Editor's note: This profile is part of Hart Energy's 50th anniversary Hall of Fame series honoring industry pioneers of the past 50 years and the Agents of Change (ACEs) who are leading the energy sector into the future.
On a bitter cold December night in eastern Alberta, the ground shook from the force of a gas well fire blowing out of control. Paul (Red) Adair (1915-2004), however, was very much in control.
“Like a military field officer literally in the heat of battle, Adair was shouting commands like a machine gun: ‘Pull those water lines closer! Get on the phone to Houston and get bigger pumps! Get a ’dozer up here; I need some elevation to look at the wellhead!’ Adair was a man in charge and everyone knew it.”
That description came from longtime Oil and Gas Investor photo editor Lowell Georgia, who photographed the legendary well control specialist in his element, a force of nature taking on and defeating a force of nature. Adair’s strategy was to attack fire with fire—a nitroglycerine explosion that snuffed it out by depriving it of oxygen—then capping the well.
It was a method he learned from his boss and mentor, Myron Kinley, and honed during World War II as a member of a U.S. Army bomb disposal team. Adair’s unit was dispatched to the heights overlooking Tokyo Harbor in the early morning of Sept. 1, 1945, where he disarmed and blew up two 16-inch guns aimed at the USS Missouri. The guns were unattended but the squad had been briefed that dissidents planned to disrupt the surrender ceremonies later that day.
Adair’s unit would continue to hunt the Japanese countryside for bombs and hidden munitions after the war. In 2023, he was inducted posthumously into the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame.
It was a gas well blowout in Smackover, Ark., in 1940 that launched Adair’s well-control career. The deafening roar from the blown well sent his fellow roughnecks racing for cover, but Adair “stayed right where he was, beside the wellhead, two feet from a stream of gas loud enough to re-program the beating of his heart; forceful enough, should he stumble or lean into its flow, to cut him into little pieces and hurl them halfway to the Louisiana border,” wrote Philip Singerman in his 1989 biography.
With a three-foot wrench, he manually tightened the bolts on the flange until the valve was back on and the well was capped. Adair’s boss almost fired him, but his courage caught the eye of Myron Kinley, the first to use explosives to extinguish an oil well fire.
He would stay with Kinley for almost 20 years before launching the Red Adair Co. in 1959. While known in the oil industry, the public would not be introduced properly until the “Devil’s Cigarette Lighter” fire in Algeria in 1962. Fueled by an enormous natural gas field, the blaze consumed 550 MMcf/d and was so bright, it could be seen by John Glenn as he orbited the earth.
“I’d rather fly in space than fight one of those wild wells any day, believe me,” Glenn told Adair when he returned from his flight aboard Friendship 7.
Something about legends must attract other legends, because it took nothing less than the 6’4” John Wayne to portray a character based on Adair in “The Hellfighters” movie in 1968. The two became friends and Wayne accompanied Adair on a 1973 well fire in Southern California.
Adair would tackle the Alpha Piper fire in 1988, the most lethal offshore disaster ever, leaving 169 dead either by fire, smoke or the frigid waters of the North Sea. He would use the Tharos, a support ship and firefighting vessel designed by Adair.
His last big triumph was in Kuwait following Desert Storm. Iraqi forces had set Kuwait oil wells ablaze when they retreated from coalition forces. Adair was among the first of 16 teams to cap 732 wells in eight months.
—Joseph Markman, senior managing editor