El Paso Natural Gas Company's First Compressor Transmission Engine

Paul Kayser found in 1928 that El Paso was the only Texas city of its size without natural gas, and he won a franchise from the city. Deliveries began on June 19, 1929, through a 204-mile, sixteen-inch pipeline from three wells near Jal, New Mexico. In its first full year, 1930, the company sold 5.5 million cubic feet. Kayser kept building through the Depression, borrowing to extend lines to copper refiners in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, then to Tucson and Phoenix, and by the end of the 1930s his pipelines reached Ajo, Arizona.

What the plaque says

El Paso Natural Gas Company's First Compressor Transmission Engine A landmark tool in man's conquest of energy. This compressor went into use in Culberson County, Tex., on Oct. 1, 1931, and served until 1969, aiding in the rise of the southwest as an industrial empire. This was the first compressor transmission engine at the number one transmission station of El Paso natural gas company, founded in 1928 by Paul Kayser, a Houston attorney. The pioneer transmission station of the El Paso natural gas company was one of the earliest in the permian basin. A cooper-bessemer type 19, this machine is an 800-horsepower horizontal tandem reciprocating compressor engine. Equipped with two 10 1/4-inch by 24-inch gas compressor cylinders, it weigh about 173,000 pounds. It served under load for 152,064 hours, compressing more than 144 billion cubic feet of natural gas in its working lifetime. It conveyed production from fields at Jal, N. M., and in Winkler County, Tex., to city of El Paso and southern New Mexico and Arizona. It was the first machine of its kind in a system that expanded into 22,000 miles of forwarding lines furnishing low-cost energy for industries and households in eleven western states. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 3.3 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 10 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• The Cable Tool Rig — steps away
• Permian Basin — steps away
• Prairie Dog — 0.8 mi
• Site of Odessa College — 1.4 mi