Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 14

It did not take Ray Holifield long to realize that Max Williams and Irv Deal were both serious and focused. They had a game plan. Williams had access to money. He had done his homework. He was on a frantic pace, driving back and forth from his Dallas office to the chalk. Irv Deal, on the other hand, was methodically setting up the business operation as Windsor/U.S.

He watched the men pull up stakes in Pearsall and move northward to another chalk trend of broken hearts and empty bank accounts. It marked the beginning of a venture that would force the two companies to invest more than four million in the production of their first seven wells. They were all drilled, it seemed, within spitting distance of those dry holes that bore the last hopes and fortunes of good men, dry holes that had already been buried, if not forgotten, beneath a stack of rusting scrap metal.

Deal sent Charles Holbrook to the field to organize his venture into the well-lamented Austin Chalk. Holbrook had been in charge of construction for his apartment development, and Deal was convinced that supervising a team to drill for oil beneath the earth was little different from overseeing a crew hired to nail together buildings on top of it. Holbrook had been successful at one. Deal had no doubt that Holbrook, with his work ethic and organizational skills, would prove just as valuable in Giddings.

A veteran of the oil patch, Clarence Cheatham, came on board to handle the day-to-day field operation of each rig, and Red Livingston signed on to direct the drilling of the wells. Back in the Fort Worth Basin, he seldom ever had to go farther down than four thousand feet to discover a positive show of oil. In the Giddings field, he would have to cut through as many as nine thousand feet to even reach the chalk.

Giddings was a brand new game.

Irv Deal thought big and sometimes bigger. That’s what Ray Holifield liked about him. Shoot for the moon, and you might just hit it. In the oil business, go for broke, he said, and if you get there, you’ve made more money than either you or your ex-wives can spend. The conservative Max Williams kept his eyes steady on the details, always on the go, promoting and looking for investors, making sure the puzzle wasn’t completed until all of the missing pieces were in place, trying to patch up any possible mistake before it occurred. Max Williams and Irv Deal would get a well. No doubt about it. But the chase for oil would be a wild ride, and both men hoped it wasn’t a long ride and oil wells kept pumping money.

Deal had the assets banked, but he preferred to keep his assets for himself, and he kept alluding to the fact that he had some investors squirreled away up in Chicago. When the timing was right, the money would be right. Max Williams kept patching together the financial end of the package with many of the Dallas connections he had made during his days at SMU and with the Chaparrals. He was a man who would not be denied, and, as in basketball, he would never give up until the final shot had been taken.

The Fort Worth Basin had been all right for the tenuous, frayed partnership of Max Williams and Irv Deal. Nothing spectacular. But all right. Pearsall had given them some oil. Not a lot. But it hadn’t given anyone a lot either. Now Holifield was seated at a desk in the Sands Motel on the edge of Giddings, hovered over an old land map, barely visible or legible beneath the dim glow of a single naked light bulb, trying to pinpoint a drilling location on that confounded line between the Knox well, a failure, and the City of Giddings No. 1, still flushing out as many as three hundred barrels of oil a day.

Ray Holifield placed a worn land map of Lee County on his desk and carefully smoothed out the folds and wrinkles. He took a pen and drew a straight line across the acreage that Randy Stewart had been able to secure from Hughes and Hughes, connecting the City of Giddings No 1 to the old Knox well. Somewhere along that line, he reasoned, would be the place to drill. Maybe a little seismic work would tell him exactly where the right pressure point had cracked the limestone, provided there was any money available for the seismic shots. Otherwise, he realized, it would be more like probing the innards of the earth with his eyes closed.

Holifield was convinced that he had a definite edge in the Giddings field, now that he was beginning to better understand it. Unlike most geologists, he had studied the nuances of similar faults and fractures before. He knew exactly what he was looking for in the seismic logs, which generally looked as though they had been written down in ancient, unknown tongues, and those strange, wavy lines were no longer a mystery.

The process was not really a complicated one. Crews set off a series of small dynamite explosions in designated areas of the field, precisely recording and timing the reflected waves or signals in order to determine the depth of the substrata. Basically, the shots did little more than vibrate the earth, but they were instrumental in turning the hit-and-miss art of oil exploration into a science-based methodology.

Ray Holifield always believed that seismograph technology was simply a bunch of shockwaves that gave eyes to the geologist and let him map the faults and fractures, anomalies and anticlines, domes, and broken strata beneath the crust of the earth where oil and gas might be accumulating. He smiled to himself. The logs were worthless if a geologist could not read them. As of yet, no geologist in his right mind had been able to make heads or tails of the seismic data being spit out in the chalk. They were still shooting in the dark at a moving target.

He adamantly told Max Williams that his particular understanding of the science had the ability to change the odds, and Williams saw no reason to doubt him.

Holifield was certain that he knew which direction the faults ran in the earth. Some things in textbooks, he said, were absolutes. He looked hard at the big chalk well. He measured distances. He calculated angles. He walked the acreage that bound together the City of Giddings and Knox wells, measuring the bleak lease lots again in yards, in feet, in inches. He did not have any existing science or technology available to him. His decision would be based more on experience and gut instincts than anything else. Trendology, following the direction set by successful wells, had long been an effective method for finding oil, However, two wells did not a trend make.

Holifield would have to gamble.

He knew how to read the earth. But no one had ever been able to read or unravel the puzzle of the Austin Chalk. The forbidden layers of limestone were as defiant in 1976 as they had been when that first renegade band of wildcatters came stomping through Lee County in the 1930s. The old school ways of exploring a field had never worked below Giddings. However, Holifield was convinced that if someone came along with the right idea and the right application, he had a chance of making a large and important field. It would require a special understanding of the limestone formations and the utilization of unconventional methods of recovery because the oil was down there lying in wait. Ray Holifield could sense it. But what would it take to unlock the crude? Who had the magic wand? The old chalk definitely wasn’t for amateurs; then again, maybe it was.

But as geologist Parke A. Dickey had once written, “We usually find oil in new places with old ideas. But sometimes we find oil in an old place with a new idea. Several times in the past, we thought we were running out of oil when actually we were only running out of ideas.” Ray Holifield had come to the chalk searching for a new idea.

He took a deep breath and selected the location for his initial venture into Lee County soil. No seismic readings. Just going down blind. Many had drilled on the land above the Austin Chalk trend. Only one well, after all of these years, remained standing. Flame outs. Blowouts. Dry outs. The rest were little more than deserted holes in a deserted field. If he missed as others had, his name and reputation both would probably be nothing more than mere afterthoughts in the annals of Giddings. If he hit, however, if he could find some way to decipher the code of the chalk, he would be recognized for his discovery of a major oilfield that had long been blasphemed and abused, feared and ignored, bypassed and condemned, but never forgotten.

Ray Holifield thought he had it all figured out. He didn’t. Historically, he knew, faults almost always ran back up from the coast at a forty-five degree angle. That’s what he had been taught. That’s what experience told him. Holifield was convinced, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he had been able to pinpoint the critical fault line that fed the City of Giddings No. 1.

Drill. Hit it. Head to the bank.

He later recalled, “My science was all wrong in the chalk. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I didn’t have a clue. A seismic reading may have told me altogether something different. We’ll never know. We simply drilled on a hunch. Mine.”

It wouldn’t be easy, and the venture got off to a rocky start. The Austin Chalk was tough enough, but it looked in the beginning at though red tape and city ordinances might present even worse problems. Ray Holifield had selected his prime location. Believed in it. Stood his ground. Wouldn’t move. The trouble was, however, his proposed drilling site lay inside the city limits of Giddings. By all rights, Windsor, which owned the permit, would not be allowed to drill without the city’s cooperation. As a community, Giddings was suffering much as it had during the Great Depression, and Lee County had always been recognized as one of the two poorest counties in Texas. Giddings needed the well. Giddings needed the business. Before any drill bit touched the ground, Max Williams and Irv Deal needed approval from the Texas Railroad Commission and a permit from the Giddings city aldermen.

They received both in July of 1976, and the newspaper reported: The well will be drilled on the H. T. Moore land. It will be located on the north side of Highway 77. Windsor Oil officials have repeated that once the work begins, they should know if there is oil within a month. The company has deposited in the city’s name a total of $25,000 in lieu of a bond in the First National Bank of Giddings.

Max Williams and Irv Deal drilled the M&K – named for landowners H. T. Moore, an African American shoe repairman in his late seventies, and James Krchnak, a traveling paint salesman of Czech descent – on acreage offset from the big chalk well. The men were staring hard at a drilling cost of about $320,000, which amounted to the total annual budget of both companies. The drill bit carved its way quickly through an overlay of eight thousand feet of soft earth, then bore heavily into the tight layers of limestone.

All or nothing. That was the creed of the chalk. All or nothing, with the emphasis almost always on nothing. The chalk was hard as concrete, and nobody ever knew exactly where the drill bit was. Ray Holifield may have been drilling for a precise spot, but there was a lot of wiggle in the chalk. Jack Killigan was an investor who had worked with Irv Deal on building a shopping center, and he told Randy Stewart, “Finding oil in the chalk is like trying to open the lock on a car door with a coat hanger that’s two blocks long.”

Day after day, the long hours weaving themselves around him like a spider web, Max Williams watched the drill bit turn with Bill Walker, an investor from Arlington, Texas, who had earned his riches by hiring an artist to paint bright-colored murals on the sides of vans and created a whole new line of vehicles he called the “Good Time Machines.” Walker needed a break. He had sold his business to his partner on a leveraged buyout, realized one day that the company was headed for the legal pitfalls of bankruptcy, and hoped he would one day see his money. Bill Walker was still waiting.

The string of pipe went deeper.

The intensity around the well was so thick, Max Williams said, that it was often difficult to breath. Emotions were running the gamut from wild expectations to a belief that the M&K might be little more than a pipe dream with more chalk than oil.

Lord, they needed the oil. Chalk was so cheap a man couldn’t give it away.

The pipe suddenly shuddered, and the well kicked wildly out of control and wide open. Oil the color of honey came bursting out of the ground. The M&K hit exactly three years to the day after Chuck Alcorn brought in the City of Giddings No. 1.

Fate? Perhaps.

A little luck? No doubt.

Irony? If a man didn’t have the good sense to be superstitious, he wouldn’t be playing in the oil game.

Max Williams stood with a face of stone, his eyes never wavering from the well as it painted the slush pits around him the color of honey gold. It had hit big, bigger than anyone had the right to expect or imagine. The rush he felt was overwhelming. It was, he said, better than hitting a fifteen-foot jump shot at the buzzer to beat Kentucky.

Bill Walker was beside himself. An oil well, he thought, came much closer to being a good time machine than a van any day of the week. Oil rushing through the pipes was not unlike the blood running through his veins. Williams, however, tried to temper his excitement with a hard dose of reality, which was always a bitter pill to swallow.

Wells had hit big in the chalk before. Would the M&K begin to slowly die out by morning? Would it be nothing more than a stagnant seep by the end of the month? One side of his brain was overcome with sheer, unadulterated emotion. The other side was numbed with concern. Wait and see, he told himself. It might be over by the end of the week. Then again, the M&K might go on for as long as Chuck Alcorn’s famous old City of Giddings well. He caught sight of Ray Holifield walking across a dirt road stained with mud and grease. Holifield was grinning in spite of himself.

“How’d she come in?” Williams asked.

“Looks like about five hundred barrels a day.”

“Any sign of her slowing down?”

Holifield shook his head. “She’s still out of control,” he said. “Just look at her. That’s what you hope for. That’s what you hardly ever get.”

Irv Deal had not yet come to the field, nor did Williams expect him. Bill Walker, the moment he arrived, had spent more time on the M&K than Irv Deal, who, with no apologies, preferred the luxury and amenities offered by the stylish life in Dallas.

Williams glanced down at his hands. They were covered with good, honest dirt, spackled with a trace of oil. He sadly shook his head. Irv Deal had no idea what he was missing.

The M&K settled down to flow more than four hundred barrels a day without any signs of ever giving up or running out. It was, most conceded, the hottest well ever drilled in the chalk. Even the City of Giddings No. 1 paled somewhat by comparison. When the news reached Dan Hughes in his Beeville office, he was elated. He had missed out on the big chalk well, he knew. Maybe the M&K would make up for it and ease the pain. Such was the complexion of oil. Such was the nature of the business.

Max Williams wrapped his arm around Holifield’s shoulder. “You must be a genius,” he said. “You told me you could outsmart the chalk, and I believe you did.”

Ray Holifield’s grin grew broader. “Now what?” he asked.

“Well, we’ve got sixty days to drill two more wells,” Williams said. ”Otherwise, we lose the leases. We’ll celebrate tonight. Tomorrow, it’s back to work.”

At the moment, Holifield was not worrying about tomorrow or the day after. He may have been grinning for all of the world to see, but the grin was a lie.

A big lie.

Ray Holifield was lucky, and he knew it.

The drill bit had hit the hard chalk and twisted off at a crooked angle. No one realized it during the chaos and frenetic activity on the rig, but the bit had badly lost its direction, strayed off course, and missed the critical fault that had been Holifield’s primary target, the one based on the Knox No. 1 log.

Instead, it had driven quite accidentally into a greater fault that harbored a much larger fractured reservoir of oil. It was a mistake, perhaps, but a mistake worth millions.

Holifield kept his secret to himself and basked in the glory of the moment. His face was streaked the color of honey. The residue on his lips tasted like oil. Oil had never tasted so sweet.