Gamble in The Devil's Chalk
Описание книги
In the mid 1970s, a band of men with little expertise in the oilfield defied the hard ground of Giddings, Texas, to search for oil in a barren, poverty-stricken land that was littered with dry holes, shattered hopes, and empty pockets. Max Williams, the former hot-shot basketball player at SMU, and Irv Deal had been in high-dollar real estate until the real estate market collapsed. Both were facing the wrath of hard times. Pat Holloway was a lawyer who operated drilling funds but had never tested the ill-fated Austin Chalk. He drilled the most and earned the most but lost it all in the shady confines of a Dallas courtroom. Jimmy Luecke was a highway patrolman who stopped Holloway for speeding one night and promised not to take him to jail if the lawyer/oilman would agree to drill on his family's land. Bill Shuford was right out of college and more interested in finding the next beer joint than his next job. Jim Dobos was a constable who used his badge to lease land, struck it rich, and was found with a gunshot in his head. Was it murder or suicide? Clayton Williams was the only big-time oilman in the bunch, but in the beginning, he made the mistake of employing the wrong geologist. Only those who used the geologic genius of Ray Holifield found oil. Holifield had cracked the code of the chalk. Gamble in the Devil's Chalk is the true story of their fights, their feuds, their trials, their tribulations, and their triumphs as they discovered the second largest oilfield in the United States during the past half century. Once they came, Giddings would never be the same again.
Отрывок из книги
The rocks scattered across the undulating pasturelands just north of Giddings and south of Dime Box intrigued him. They were of the ages, as ancient and as common as time itself, and the stories they could tell remained, more or less, untold. The dirt was an old friend indeed. It buried, then nourished, his seed, gave him a harvest and grew the tall grasses that kept his cattle fed, often with sun burnt stalks. Dirt ran shallow above those great folds of Austin Chalk, hiding the complexities of a puzzle that only he and he alone had been able to unravel.
Reinhardt Richter was known by many and understood by few, none of whom ever admitted it. There were those in Lee County who said privately and over a beer or two that Richter was a little different, not quite like the rest of the folks, and not all of them were quite right either. He was not a tall man, standing only about five feet and ten inches, but he was wide, broad-shouldered, and carved with solid muscle, known far and wide for his ungodly strength.
.....
After battling the sun-baked farmlands for far too many months, the weary and slump-shouldered oilmen all came to the same final and basic conclusion. The Austin Chalk bled a little oil from time to time, but there wasn’t enough crude in the ground to fill a good-sized wheelbarrow. They turned their backs on the good earth surrounding Giddings and drove away. They ignored the field, but none of them ever forgot it.
What Union Producing decided it was willing to sell Chuck Alcorn in 1972, officials said, were “two old chalk dogs,” which was the term they used to describe the Preuss and City of Giddings wells. It was all worthless property to them.
.....