Gamble in The Devil's Chalk. Caleb Pirtle III
on the dollar and suffer the losses and the consequences.
Work was difficult to find. New and old fields alike were dying for lack of funds, lack of interest, lack of gumption. A man might be willing to gamble, but only as long as he still had a few chips left to wager. The only difference between a wildcatter and a bum was the number of empty beer bottles sitting on the table in front of him. The wildcatter didn’t have any.
Chuck Alcorn was grateful for any scrap of salvage business that came his way. Someone had drilled on promise and potential. Someone had gone broke. Dry hole. Disappointing hole. The money ran short. The money ran out.
The phone call came. The well would be his baby now, provided he wanted it, and Chuck Alcorn hated to ever say he didn’t. Some of the wells he bought outright. Some he bought on credit, hoping to turn a profit before the note came due. Some he bought so low he felt like he had stolen them.
In some, the oil was so scarce he felt as though he had been swindled. No time to fret. No reason to worry. All in a day’s work. Chuck Alcorn understood simple realities. He hadn’t lost the dream. He still wanted an oil well. Any well. Any place. As long as it kept on producing. He wasn’t a greedy man. One good well just might be enough, although enough was never enough in the oil patch where, during tough times, a man could run out of money and friends at about the same time.
That was the reason why Chuck Alcorn was heading in the general direction of Giddings on such a dreary afternoon. He turned on the radio in his pickup truck, and, amongst the static, the news kept spitting out bursts of information about the Israeli and Arab war. Deadly. Brutal. Frightening consequences. Only the Good Lord had any idea about what the conflict might do to the oil business, which was already hanging on with broken fingernails. Chuck Alcorn shook his head. The business had always been a sordid kind of gamble where men bet their lives, their fortunes, their futures on a stacked deck. Now he had begun to wonder if there was anyone left who could afford the ante. A pair of deuces in a game of two-handed poker was no hand at all.
Chuck Alcorn passed the rolling hills, the hardwood timber stands, the grazing cattle, the peanut fields that needed the rain a lot more than he did. The oilfield business was difficult enough dry. Wet, it could be a nightmare unless, of course, it was wet with oil. Early that morning, his tool pusher, Alfred Baros, had called to let him know that the Halliburton crew he had hired was on site and getting ready to pump acid down the gullet of the old City of Giddings No. 1 that afternoon. The well, for better or worse, now belonged to Chuck Alcorn, lock, stock and barrel. He had already spent as much money as the salvage was worth. Good money. Maybe even good money after bad. Did he have any interest in driving up and seeing for himself whether or not a heavy dose of acidized mud could awaken the last, best, and probably only hope in the Giddings field?
“What do you think?” Alcorn asked.
“Might be pretty good.”
“It’s in the chalk.”
“They think it has a little promise.”
“Oil?”
“No, just a little promise.”
Chuck Alcorn laughed and didn’t know why.
“The chalk’s fickle.”
“It blew a lot of oil before.”
“Maybe she spit out all she’s had, and there’s nothing left.”
“I got a good feeling about this one.”
“The chalk will lie to you.”
“Today might be different.”
Chuck Alcorn grinned. In the oil business, every day was always different. Good, maybe. Bad, perhaps. But always different. In recent months, however, the bad days had far outnumbered the good ones, and he had no reason to raise his expectations about the drive to Giddings. So often, the bottom of the hole revealed little more than the bottom of a hole. The task awaiting him was, at best, just another routine salvage job. Another day. Another dollar. Nothing more. Probably less.
The City of Giddings well had been drilled in the dastardly Austin Chalk Trend back in 1960 by Union Producing Company, which in time, would find itself as a branch of Pennzoil. Union Producing had discovered far too quickly that the Austin Chalk was a breaker, the kind that drove sane men mad and mad men to ruin. It broke bits. It broke spirits. It broke men. It broke bank accounts. It broke hearts. Lots of hearts.
The chalk trend was a great underground formation extending up from Mexico, spreading across South Texas, and spilling down toward the gulf coast of Louisiana. For eons, it had remained there untouched, a fine-grained limestone and calcite crystal cast containing fossilized shells of microscopic foraminifers, mollusks, echinoids, and other marine organic debris, some of it, perhaps, even left behind by the great flood. The Upper Cretaceous Austin Chalk sprawling beneath Giddings was renowned and roundly cursed for being a foreboding and demanding formation, at least a hundred feet thick beneath Burleson County and layered more than eight-hundred-feet thick in places below Lee County – a buffer between the peanut farms, the ranch lands, and old Reinhardt Richter’s chambers of hell.
The gardens of chalk confronted and confounded oilmen with a proposition that only the devil could have devised. They knew the trend encased great amounts of oil, but the chalk was a tight formation, the oil trapped in the dense rock. It was a limestone beast interwoven with elusive fractures that if found and penetrated would allow the crude to travel to the wellbore. No fractures. No oil. No production.
When Union Producing Company decided to take a chance with the chalk, its geologists had no magic bullet to pinpoint those cracks. Finding oil was little different from tracking down the proverbial needle in a haystack. How many fractures were there? How far apart were they? How deep did they go? And how large were they? The size of a boxcar or the eye of a needle? The wildcatter going straight down with a vertical well knew he was drilling blind. Far too often, a well had a habit of coming in with a bang and soon going out with a whimper.
On that fateful afternoon in 1960, the City of Giddings No. 1, in fact, had erupted with a hundred barrels of oil a day, indicating that it could make a fair amount of natural gas as well. Union Producing was ecstatic. The company egotistically believed that it had obviously cracked the code of the chalk.
Two other wells, however, were hastily drilled in the southern acreage of Lee County, but their production had been marginal at best. The oil making its way to the top was worth a great deal less than the cost of a drill bit going down.
The cranky City of Giddings well, on the other hand, had all the significant signs of becoming a big winner in a field littered with losses. A hundred barrels a day seemed like the mother lode of the chalk, and, even more intriguing, the oil flowing to the surface had a much different color and consistency from the raw crude that had risen reluctantly from the depths of Union Producing’s Preuss No. 1 and Jenke wells. It wasn’t black and full of tar. Not this oil. Not this time. It was lighter and bore a distinctive hint of gold. It was, the drilling crew agreed without argument, the rich color of honey.
They shook hands, slapped each other on the back, shared a drink or two of hard whiskey in a bar outside of Giddings, and went to sleep that night with visions of riches far greater than any of them had imagined.
Disaster descended upon the cursed gardens of chalk almost immediately. Union Producing killed the flow of the City of Giddings well so that its crew would be able to remove the drilling rig and install the proper production equipment. It was time-honored, and time-approved standard operating procedure. The hole was dutifully plugged with several thousand gallons of drilling mud. Nothing unusual about that. The crew had done the procedure at least a hundred times before, maybe more. Finally, as the day neared an end, the mud pack was punctured, and the crew waited for production to begin.
But something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong. The flow was sluggish, with oil reaching the surface at a much slower rate than it had before, falling far short of a hundred barrels a day. The well had barely been born, and already it lay dying.
No gusher. No hole full of riches. Just a hole. In desperation,