William Travers; Oil Industry Pioneer

William Jasper Travers, who as manager of Atlantic Richfield Co.’s drilling and production department built the first offshore drilling island in the Santa Barbara Channel at Rincon Point in the 1950s, is dead at age 79.

The Carpinteria resident, who after retiring from Richfield (now Arco), founded Anacapa Oil Corp., a producer of natural gas, died of heart failure in Santa Barbara.

Son of a co-founder of the Brea Oil Co. in Orange County, Travers became district drilling engineer for Richfield in the 1930s. The directional drilling techniques he perfected enabled the drilling of 25 new oil wells from the shore to under Long Beach Harbor. As Richfield’s vice president for exploration and production, he later approved the leasing of what was to become America’s largest oil field, the Prudhoe Bay area of northern Alaska.

E. M. (Mo) Benson, Arco’s vice chairman emeritus, also credited Travers with adapting some precast, 40-ton pods he had seen in France and placing them around the drilling islands rather than the giant rocks customarily used. Travers’ pods remain intact to this day, Benson said, while many of those shored with rock have been damaged or destroyed.

A Stanford University graduate, at his death he was the longest standing member of the Stanford Earth Science Investment Advisors Committee and was a 58-year member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers.

Survivors include his wife, Beatrice, and two sons.