Engineers Drill an Early Oil Well at Baku

On the Absheron Peninsula bordering the Caspian Sea, surface seepages of petroleum had sustained local commerce and regional trade routes since antiquity. Travelers over several centuries recorded pits dug by hand to collect bitumen and dark liquid fuel, which found use as lamp oil and medical salves. By the early nineteenth century, the Russian Empire had annexed the Baku Khanate and assumed control over roughly 120 oil wells. Rather than operating these sites directly, imperial authorities managed extraction through the otkupchina lease system, granting short-term exclusive contracts to private individuals. Because these agreements provided little incentive to improve recovery methods or invest in permanent infrastructure, total regional output remained stagnant for decades, rarely exceeding five thousand tons annually.

Baku oil extraction during the early imperial era relied almost entirely on laborers manually bailing seepage out of shallow pits. Handlers loaded the fluid into horse-drawn wagons carrying two barrels at a time, moving it to shore-based distillation units or directly onto Caspian merchant vessels bound for Persia and Russian cities such as Saint Petersburg. In 1837, Russian engineer Nikolay Voskoboynikov constructed an oil-distilling factory in the nearby settlement of Balaxani. Convinced that manual collection failed to tap the region's true reservoir potential, Voskoboynikov proposed in 1844 that engineers drill deep boreholes into the earth rather than relying on hand excavation. His proposal gained crucial bureaucratic support from Vasily Semyonov, whose official survey of the Caucasus territories reinforced the argument.