The Crew was baffled. Union Producing was devastated. It had looked so good for such a short period of time, then production faded away like a candle’s flame in a wet summer wind. Saner heads searched for an explanation. That’s just the chalk, they said. Promises you the world. Doesn’t give you a doggone thing. Makes your heart race. Then breaks it. The chalk is a lying sonuvabitch. There are more oilmen than rocks busted around here.
It was easy for Union Producing to blame the chalk. Everybody blamed the damnable old chalk. It was tricky. It was fraught with frustrations. Drilling through those tightly laced layers was no different from driving a ten-penny nail through a concrete block.
The Austin Chalk that held the City of Giddings well was eight hundred feet thick, but a crew was forced to drill down somewhere between eight to nine thousand feet to even reach it. And down below, in the great, unknown stratum of cracked and fossilized limestone, near Reinhardt Richter’s personal chambers of hell, the oil was trapped and locked tight inside a maze of faults.
The chalk may have been saturated with oil – everyone knew it was – and the oil had a history of spilling out into fractures both large and small, mostly small, but few had managed to locate enough porosity and permeability in the limestone to pull a big payday’s worth of crude to the surface,
Still, the chalk continued to tempt and taunt those wildcatters who were tough enough, determined enough, or sometimes drunk enough to think they could find their way down to vast and uncharted caverns of oil.
The caverns, the reservoirs, the great pools of oil had never been there, but, in the beginning, no one knew it. They only hoped, which was a precarious, unstable way to do business. Only independent oilmen, the little guys in the business, dared to defy the chalk. They were poor boy operators, drilling on a shoestring, not much to invest. Not much to lose. A few had lost it all before anyway.
The major oil companies had long ago washed their hands of the Austin Chalk fields. Maybe there was oil in the ground. Maybe not. But it was certainly too costly for them to haul a crew out to Giddings and find out.
Wildcatters, searching for unknown and undeveloped fields, had ventured out into the chalk back during the 1930s. They possessed no maps, few, if any, seismographs to read, and attached their hopes to geologists who had never been able to understand the chalk or decipher the fractures. The boom struck South and Central Texas hard, although the term “boom” might be somewhat misleading.
The wells came in with all the fury of a Roman candle and quickly fizzled out. No one, not even the learned scholars of geology and petroleum engineering, could figure out why the wells kept acting in such a strange and mischievous manner. Give a little. Take it back. A few barrels. A few drops. And the wells rapidly lapsed back into a coma.
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.
Maybe Alcorn could sell the scrap metal for enough money to make it worth his while. Maybe not. Union Producing did not care one way or another. The company had already invested the last dollar it ever wanted to spend in the chalk, and it was willing to accept a check, cash, or money order for $27,500, an amount they figured just about covered the salvage value of the abandoned production equipment they had left behind.
Let Chuck Alcorn ante up a few dollars, then see if he could somehow manage to turn a profit, even a small one, while inheriting the headaches that went with the territory. Hell, he was used to it.
Chuck Alcorn, however, had a far different idea rattling around in his mind. He had hired a Halliburton crew to pump as much as ten thousand gallons of hydrochloric acid down the holes and shock the wells in an effort to kick-start production. Just maybe the acid would be able to clean out some of the crevices and fractures in the rock, giving the oil more room to push its way to the top. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But, Lord, if he was just able to coax another twenty or thirty barrels of oil a day out of the ground, Chuck Alcorn would indeed be a happy man. Not rich, perhaps. But happy.
He glanced briefly at the four-sided clock tower atop the red brick Lee County Courthouse as he drove through downtown Giddings, heading south on U.S. 77 and leaving behind a little community of twenty-five hundred hard-working, God-fearing, straight-laced souls, most of them German Lutherans.
Before the day came to an end, he would ignite the process that, in time, would change his life and their lives forever. He turned off onto FM 448 and bounced his way steadily toward the old Giddings Airport property. A gravel road finally led him to the well, and he witnessed an odd and curious sight, almost surreal in nature, unfolding before him.
His red trailer, loaded down with a well-worn workover rig, had been backed in alongside the old Union Producing pump jack, still in place, but its silver paint, streaked and fading, was beginning to show the wear and tear of weather and time. The head of the embattled pump jack, for some reason, had been sheared off, and it lay in a clump of weeds like a decapitated old warhorse that had been slain, left unburied, and forgotten. Closer to the rig itself sat Halliburton’s “Big Red” pumping unit truck and transport trailer, both being prepared for another standard light acid job. A lot of mud. A little acid. A little sweat. A short turn around. Wouldn’t take long, and the crew would be back on the road and headed again toward Houston long before darkness descended on the gardens of chalk.
Chuck Alcorn frowned. The hookup at the wellhead bothered him. There wasn’t anything particularly normal about it. The nipple valve did not dangle just as foot or two off the drilling platform floor as it should have. The damn thing was hanging at least ten good feet in the air, and the flexible steel acid hose curled out of it like the long, coiled stem of an ancient Oriental pipe, the kind used to smoke tobacco and sometimes marijuana, if one were so inclined.
Chuck Alcorn opened the door of the pickup truck and stepped out. A cool wind crept across the empty prairie and kicked up dust against his boots. The sudden, ominous sound of metal clanging against each other startled him. He jerked his head around, and his gaze swept swiftly across the well site. Trouble made its own peculiar brand of noise, and he had heard trouble rumbling his way before. That was the oil business, the nature of the beast. Hope for the best. Expect the worst.
The ground-level flow lines that connected the well to the storage tanks were shaking violently, threatening to tear themselves loose at any moment. The cylindrical separator unit was flaring gas, rocking with turbulence back and forth, looking and sounding for all the world like the beginning of a small war.
Chuck Alcorn had no idea what was going through the lines. But he knew it was moving with a powerful force. Hang on, he thought. Don’t let it get away from you. Ride it out. Volcanoes had erupted with less intensity. He watched as his tool pusher leaped from the rig and rushed toward him. “What’s wrong?” Chuck Alcorn asked.
“You ain’t gonna believe it,” Alfred Baros said, his breath coming in short bursts.
“Ain’t gonna believe what?”
“That dadgummed thing is flowing with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure.”
Chuck Alcorn ran to toward the derrick, climbing up the metal arms of the rig so he could read the gauge at the top of the nipple valve, trapped in the air far higher than it should have been. Sure enough, he discovered, the well was flowing with fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, an enormous and extraordinary amount of pressure. Chuck Alcorn held on and prayed the well wouldn’t blow with him still hanging on the rim of the derrick.
If