New Oil: The Giddings Gamble
The Austin chalk is the most perverse, contrary, incorrigible oil field known to man. The big oil companies tried it and gave up. But one man learned the way to make the chalk yield its secrets—and its oil.
James says: Who is that on the cover of the February 1981 publication ? I think his name is David Perkins, anfriend of my brothers from younger years. IF that’s him where is he now ? (October 21st, 2009 at 4:22pm)
The day after the Arabs and Israelis started their October 1973 war, C.W. “Chuck” Alcorn, Jr., drove through the heart of Central Texas hoping for an oil well. Things did not look especially promising. The sky was gray and dreary. The gently rolling cattle ranches and peanut farms of Lee County appeared barren and unyielding. But Alcorn still harbored a cautious optimism. That morning his tool pusher had called to tell him that the Halliburton crew was pumping acid down the throat of the No.1 City of Giddings. By late afternoon the job would be complete. Alcorn wanted to be on hand to see what happened next — if anything.
At first glance Chuck Alcorn looked like a Hollywood version of the vanishing Texas wildcatter. A lanky six feet four inches tall and forty years old, he had prematurely gray hair and a handsome boyish face. He was third-generation Texas oil patch, the son of an independent drilling contractor. Alcorn had paid for his college education by roughnecking in the oil fields during the summer and had graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in geology, which he had put to practical use ever since. Earlier in the day he had doffed his pin-striped business suit and changed into his oil field clothes: a khaki shirt, khaki pants, muddy brown cowboy boots, and a battered brown cowboy hat with a narrow, curled-up brim. Crammed in behind the wheel of his four-door Ford, he personified the quixotic spirit of all great Texas oil finders.
Of course, as Chuck Alcorn would cheerfully admit, he was not a true wildcatter. He had made his career in what he called “the unromantic side of the oil business.” Having begun with Gulf Oil, he was now the owner of an oil well salvage company based in Victoria. Rather than exploring for new fields, he specialized in buying up old wells and rejuvenating them with special stimulation treatments like acidizing. He was, in essence, the oil business equivalent of a used-car dealer.
Alcorn liked his work even though these were tough times for Texas oilmen. The world was glutted with foreign oil. Prices were under $4 a barrel. Drilling activity was at a twenty-year low. The major companies were selling many of their old onshore properties in order to put more money offshore or into investments other than oil, and independent operators appeared to be a dying breed. Alcorn was glad of any business he could get.
He regarded the No. 1 City of Giddings as a routine salvage job. One of only four marginally productive wells in the southern two thirds of the country, the No. 1 City had been drilled back in 1960 by Union Producing Company, which later became a part of Pennzoil. As Alcorn had the story, the No. 1 City was intended to test a potential oil-bearing layer called the Austin chalk. At first, the well had looked pretty good. It came in flowing at a rate of slightly less than one hundred barrels of oil per day and making what appeared to be a fair amount of natural gas. What was more, Alcorn was told, the oil from the No. 1 City was not the same color and consistency as the oil from its sister well, the nearby Preuss No. 1, or from the Jenke, the other productive well in the county at the time. Instead of being black and full of tar, it was an unusual light yellow, the color of honey.
Unfortunately, Union Producing had killed the flow of the No. 1 City in order to remove the drilling rig and install the proper production equipment. This was done in the usual manner: by plugging the hole with several thousand gallons of drilling mud. When it came time to start production, the mud pack was repunctured, but the flow never resumed its original rate. Instead of producing almost a hundred barrels per day, the No. 1 City coughted up only five or ten, and getting even that much out eventually required the installation of a pump jack.
Union Producing ultimately blamed the behavior of the No. 1 City on the tricky, frustrating, and often cursed Austin chalk. A stratum of fractured limestone running from Mexico through Texas and on to Florida, the Austin chalk got its name because it out cropped near the city of Austin. The part of it that interested oilmen was a band about ten to twenty miles wide and anywhere from 200 to 800 feet thick that was located at depths of 8000 to 12,000 feet. The Austin chalk was only slightly porous, which meant that it was not, technically, an oil-bearing sand. What oil the chalk contained appeared to be trapped in systems of faults and fractured in the rock. Oilmen had drilled the chalk as far back as the thirties, when the first so-called Austin chalk oil boom began, and as recently as the early seventies, when a chalk boom got started in South Texas. But chalk wells all seemed to have one bad thing in common: they came in like barnburners and rapidly gave out. A chalk boom always turned into a bust. No one really knew why Austin chalk wells acted this way, but the obvious answer was that the Austin chalk did not contain very much oil.
When Chuck Alcorn had gone round to Union Producing in 1972 looking to buy some old production, the Union men had offered him what they called “two old chalk dogs” — the Preuss No. 1 and the No. 1 City of Giddings. Alcorn bought the two wells for about $27,500, which was more or less the salvage value of the production equipment in place. His plan was to shock them back into better production by pumping 10,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid down their holes. The acid, he hoped, would clean out some of the rock crevices and allow more oil to come up, although he did no expect much from either well. He would be satisfied if he could increase their production by even twenty or thirty barrels a day.
Chalking One Up
When Alcorn reached Giddings the four-sided clock tower of the red brick Lee County Courthouse showed half past three. As usual, not much was going on in this “city” of 2500 folk, mostly German Lutherans. There were maybe three or four cars waiting at the stoplight where U.S. 290 crossed U.S. 77. There were few old pickups parked by the feed store, the two little banks, and the City Meat Market, and one or two people were on the street. That was about it.
Alcorn headed south on U.S. 77 toward La Grange, then veered off on FM 448 toward the old Giddings Airport property. Just past the city limits he turned onto a gravel ranch road. After two more left turns he pulled up at the well.
To an experienced oilman, the No. 1 City of Giddings made an odd sight. The old silver-painted Union Producing Company pump jack was still in place, but its head had been sheered off and now lay in a clump of weeks like a fallen war-horse. Alcorn’s bright-red trailer-borne workover rig was parked at a tight angle to the decapitated pump jack. Near the rig were a Halliburton “Big Red” pumping unit truck and a “Big Red” acid transport trailer. That was the standard assemble for a light acid job like this one. The thing that looked strange was the hookup at the wellhead. Instead of being just a few feet off the drilling platform floor, the nipple valve was sticking up in the air about ten feet. The flexible steel acid hose curled out of it like the stem of a hookah.
As Alcorn got out of his car he heard an unexpected racket — the sound of clanging metal. His eyes swept across the well site. The ground-level flow lines connecting the well to the storage tanks were shaking violently. The cylindrical separator unit was rocking back and forth and flaring gas. Whatever was going through the lines was moving with powerful force.
Alfred Baros, the tool pusher, rushed over from the rig. “You’re not gonna believe it,” he told Alcorn, “but it’s flowing with fifteen hundred pounds.”
The two men hurried over to the derrick. Alcorn climbed up the rig so he could read the pressure gauge at the top of the jury-rigged nipple valve. Just a Baros had reported, the gauge showed that the well was flowing with 1500 pounds per square inch, an extraordinary pressure. Unlike the scenes of oil wells in the movies, there was no great plume of oil shooting through the top of the crown block. Instead, the oil was racing through the acid hose and the flow lines, causing the loud clanging.
In order to get a look at what was coming up from the hold, Alcorn opened a needle valve near the pressure gauge. He got his second big surprise of the day. The stream that burst forth was not the sticky black he expected. It was light and yellowish. Alcorn could hardly believe his eyes. He stuck his hand in the middle of the spray and bathed his fingers in the oil.
“It’s that honey-colored oil,” he said in amazement as the memory of Union Producing Company’s experience with the well flashed through his mind. “It’s flowing that honey-colored oil.”
Now Alcorn was really getting excited. The fact that the oil flowing from the No. 1 City was a different color from the oil produced by the other wells in the area suggested that he might have stumbled onto a whole new field. The honey-colored oil also appeared to be less viscous and of higher gravity than the black oil from the other wells, which meant it would be easier to refine—and therefore more valuable—than ordinary “black gold.” It was almost good enough to pump right into his Ford and drive away on.
Alcorn got down from the rig and went over to check the storage tanks. To his further amazement, he discovered that the well had already made forty barrels of oil that day and was continuing to flow at a rate of more than three hundred barrels a day. Suddenly his old chalk dog salvage job was looking like a hell of a well.
Then Baros told his boss the bad news. Because the well had come in so fast, so strong, and so unexpectedly, the crew had not had time to remove the acid hose and install the proper production equipment.
“It looks like we’ll have to kill the well to get the equipment on,” Baros said.
“You’ll have to kill me first,” Alcorn said.
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