Schafer. It’s located here in Dallas, and they have the best group of petroleum engineers and finest bunch of geologists you can find.”
“Does John need a new client?”
“John’s always looking for somebody who’s looking for oil.”
Max Williams and Irv Deal sat down in the well-appointed and prestigious Dallas office of John LaRue, Joe Moore, and Bob Schafer. Yes, the petroleum engineers said, they knew all about the historical incongruities of the Austin Chalk. They had heard the horror stories, most if not all of them. Certainly, it was their business to study the earth and understand the nuances of its anomalies.
John LaRue, however, was blunt and frank with them both, pointing out that his firm did not recommend any kind of oil venture down in the cursed Pearsall region. He possessed an unpublished and unprinted engineering study of the chalk and, in essence, it concluded: Get the hell out of Pearsall. And that’s what he told them: “Stay the hell out of Pearsall.”
Irv Deal and Max Williams, however, were determined to move forward in spite of the foreboding reputation hovering around the Pearsall field like a dark cloud devoid of any silver linings. The chalk might indeed be capricious. LaRue might be right in his assessment. But Edwin Cox was a respected oilman. He had operations in the chalk. He had recommended for them to buy leases in the chalk. And their minds were made up. At least, Max Williams was convinced that he could meet the chalk on its own terms and win. For him, it was Pearsall or bust. The odds weighed heavily on bust.
John LaRue had dealt with stubborn men before. He leaned back in his chair and said, “We’ll work with you although I want you to understand the risk involved. We’ll take only a small amount of upfront money. We’ll charge you twenty-five dollars an hour to handle any geological and engineering work we do. We normally charge fifty. And we’ll ask for a two and a half percent override in case you beat the odds. You’ll receive a discount on our hourly rate, but, otherwise, it’s pretty much our standard deal.”
Max Williams and Irv Deal looked at each other, then nodded. It sounded like a reasonable proposal.
“I assume you’ll have a geologist assigned to us,” Williams said.
“I will.”
“He have a name?”
“Ray Holifield.”
“Tell me about Holifield,” Deal said.
“He’s got an awful good resume,” LaRue said. “He’s young. He’s energetic. He’s a brilliant geologist who’s worked in oilfields all over the world, especially in fractured reservoirs in the Middle East. He’s about as you good as you can get.”
The men all shook hands. They signed an agreement. John LaRue placed a call to Ray Holifield’s office.
It was once written that “if you see a man walking down the street with oil on his shoes where it shouldn’t be, no oil on his hair where it should be, that’s an oilman. If he has a faraway look in his eyes and seems to be contemplating the depths of the Jurassic sandstone in Persia, that’s a geologist. Have pity on him. He’s just as lonesome as he looks … (A geologist) draws on his total knowledge, experience, and the facts he has, says a prayer if he is a religious man, and then gives his best judgment. But the proof of whether he is right or wrong comes only when oil is found or not found.”
As one old oilman said, “Little boys who pick up rocks either go to prison or become geologists.” Ray Holifield had been picking up rocks for a long time, and he always had that faraway look in his eyes. Mostly, he studied and worked the oilfields alone. He was just as lonesome as he looked.
Ray Holifield had gone to college in 1955 with the sole intention of becoming a lawyer. It was a difficult task from day one. He had grown up as the inquisitive son of an Arkansas sharecropper in a ramshackle home tucked back in the Ozarks, not too far from Rector and a little closer to Piggott. About all his mother was ever able to give him was a strong work ethic. It would be enough, she said, to get him through life no matter what he chose to do. Determined to work his way through the University of Missouri in pursuit of a career in law, Holifield accepted a part-time job in the geology department. He recalled, “All of the professors had begun teaching during the Great Depression, and they understood the financial hardship I was facing. They sort of adopted me.” Holifield could easily identify with his professors, who became his mentors, and they could empathize with him.
He often worked fifty hours a week, mostly at night, late at night, and earned a dollar an hour when the going rate for student employment generally topped out around fifty cents an hour. Somewhere between his duties of cleaning slides and pinpointing the dates for odd collections of rocks, Ray Holifield lost all interest in becoming a lawyer. The earth, he decided afforded him more complexities and enigmas than a courtroom.
By 1964, he had earned his Master’s Degree in geology, sold a little insurance to keep his wife and three children fed, and was offered a job with Texaco. He worked for a time as a micro paleontologist, studying the age of rocks and identifying fossils, then was moved on to New Orleans where he began mapping the sands of the Gulf Coast, serving as a stratigrapher. He was walking across sands on the beach, he said, and was struck by the sudden realization that their appearance had not changed in the last ten million years. The old earth beneath his feet might shift around some from time to time. But, in reality, it never really changed. It simply grew older. That’s all.
Holifield studied the currents flowing west to east at the mouth of rivers, both large and small, washing sediment far out to the deep. He was involved in finding sweet spots for offshore drilling beyond the coastline of Louisiana. In the late hours, he sat alone, looking closely at seismic readings, learning to recognize those distinct substrata characters that indicated a strong potential for oil. He was dispatched into the field to track down and buy oil leases, and Holifield collected the data that Texaco needed to make a major sale in 1967, earning the company hundreds of millions of dollars, not bad at all for a young, gangling geologist who wore thick, black sideburns, large, dark, horn-rimmed glasses, and earned $575 a month.
By 1970, Ray Holifield had walked away from Texaco and journeyed again to Texas, accepting a position with D. R. McCord & Associates in Dallas. Within weeks, he had been shipped out to foreign shores and assigned to conduct the geological evaluation of the vast oilfields being drilled in North Africa, Australia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. He buckled down – it was the chance of a lifetime, he said – working as many as eighty hours a week. Out in the field. On the desert. In the bars. Day and night.
Oil and water might not mix. But oil and whiskey certainly did. “I wasn’t really an expert,” Holifield said with a grin, “but I certainly made myself appear to be one, and nobody ever knew the difference.”
The stern-faced Minister of Petroleum in Algeria came marching unannounced into Holifield’s office one morning and dropped a map on his desk. He had marked the site of each well drilled in the country, and he asked a simple question that had occupied the minds of oilmen for generations. “Why are some of these good wells?” he asked. “And why are some of them bad?”
Ray Holifield did not have a ready answer. Wished he did. But he didn’t. And it was not the time to bluff. He would spend the rest of his life searching for an answer to the riddle, even though, he knew, the geology of each field was hardly ever the same and almost always had to be interpreted differently. For decades, the industry had understood the basic strategy of drilling on and around salt domes or in traditional oil-bearing sands. The Middle East, however, remained an enigma. Holifield uncovered the fact that the old faults had been cemented together with limestone crystals. Oil might well
