inside the storage chambers of ancient rock. Calcite plugged the fissures. The oil couldn’t get out. It couldn’t be pumped. It defied anyone who tried to find it. The oil was a fortune encased and entombed in compressed stone
Holifield made a fascinating discovery, and, to him, it generated a revolutionary concept. Eons ago, the pressure deep inside the earth had been so strong that the faults had a tendency to bend sharply at the edges of the desert, breaking the rocks and creating a fractured reservoir where the oil had been collected. Without those fractures, the field would have appeared to be barren. What an oil exploration company needed to do was frac the well and create its own fractures down in the faults. Special fluids were forced into the wellbore by a powerful hydraulic pump, shattering the limestone and opening up the fissures so hydrocarbons could flow more freely into the shaft of the bore. Otherwise, the fortune went to waste. Ray Holifield took the knowledge he learned and the data he had compiled from the hard rock, limestone formations beneath the desert floor and filed them away.
Holifield’s geologic work and track record during his years in the Middle East oilfields were sterling. Some of the wells drilled on locations he had chosen were flowing a hundred thousand barrels of oil a day. He had a knack for reading the seismic data of the formations correctly. When he selected a location, it was usually a good one, even though some wells were better than others. He was in the field with the crew, a permanent fixture on the rigs. He survived massive blow-outs, including one that burned up forty thousand barrels of oil a day for six months before the famed Red Adair arrived from Houston and killed the flames by pumping cement down the hole. Those in high places kept a watchful eye on his successes in the field. Other geologists simply searched for oil, they whispered among themselves. Ray Holifield had a knack for knowing where it was buried.
The Minister of Petroleum in Saudi Arabia made him a quiet and private offer. If Holifield would agree to stay in the Middle East and direct the geology of the country’s oil exploration efforts, he would be allowed to live in a small palace, have a special driver for his car, be given enough money to place his children in one of Europe’s best schools, and earn a salary of $250,000 a year. Holifield accepted the proposal without hesitation. There really wasn’t anything for him to consider. Back home, not even the presidents of major oil companies made that kind of money. Ray Holifield smiled to himself. He may not be king. But he was certainly close to one. Oil had a way of making a lot of people in power happy throughout Saudi Arabia, and, if nothing else, he could find oil.
Holifield promptly flew home, apologetically resigned his position at D. R. McCord, sold his Dallas home, took all of the shots necessary for living overseas, applied for his visa, and made sure that his passport was up to date. He was leaving nothing to chance. He viewed himself as an expatriate extraordinaire.
The phone rang. He wasn’t expecting a call. It was the Minister of Petroleum on the other end of the line. He was speaking in hushed tones. “There appears to have been a slight problem,” he said.
“What kind of problem?”
“Word has leaked out about how much money I offered you. Word has come down that it is far too much.”
“We can certainly negotiate the money,” Holifield said. “What’s the new offer?”
“There isn’t one. Everything has changed. The agreement we signed with you has been cancelled.”
Silence. The phone went dead.
When he had crawled out of bed early that morning, Ray Holifield thought he would soon be living in a palace among royalty, working as the head geologist in one of the greatest oilfields in the world. Oil had made a lot of people wealthy. He had a chance to get rich as well.
Then the phone rang, and, within the space of a dozen well-chosen words, his new world had not only crumbled and fallen apart, it had been rudely and ruthlessly yanked out from beneath him. Holifield suddenly realized that he had absolutely nothing. No job. No salary. No home. Saved a little money. Not much. Tucked it away in a bank. For all practical purposes, however, he and his family were out on the streets. His tenuous and circuitous life had gone from rags to riches to rags again. What a difference those dozen little words could make.
He sighed, squared his shoulders, and accepted the grim fact that he would have to begin again. Some company out there must need a good geologist with his experience. Who knows? He might even wind up in the Middle East for another tour of duty.
Holifield was right, and he was wrong. Someone did need a good geologist. The Middle East was out of the question. He had served his time and left his imprint on the desert for others who would follow.
Ray Holifield went to work for the geology firm of Larue, Moore & Schafer in Dallas, developing oil and gas prospects with an increased emphasis on low permeability sands and carbonates. The pay wasn’t particularly good. He even heard that a couple of businessmen involved with some kind of oil fund was providing part of the money necessary to hire him. By now, Holifield had learned that the Middle East had made the decision to cut off much of the oil supplied to the United States, and he had a much better understanding of why the Minister of Petroleum had succinctly told him that everything had changed. It had indeed changed. Maybe even for the better.
The demand for domestic oil was rising, and so was the price for crude, inching up near eight dollars a barrel. It still took a good well delivering a high volume of oil on a consistent basis to make a decent payday, especially for the major companies. For independent operators, the sudden real estate slump had made a lot of investors nervous. If they still had any money, most did not want to give it up, no matter how glamorous an oilfield prospectus might sound. Holifield knew he wouldn’t have any problem staying busy, but he wondered just how productive he could be when it seemed that all of the easy fields had already been discovered. The only temptation beckoned from those out-of-the-way sections of empty acreage that had been passed over time and again. A few parcels of the land were even dotted with dry holes. Rig sites were overgrown with brush and weeds. Hopes had been dashed. Dreams had turned sour. Old truck roads had been swept away by the winds. Even the ruts had filled in.
If an investor did happen to be straying into the oil business, where would Ray Holifield find a deal that he could recommend with a clear conscience? He had no idea. He was about to find out.
The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up and heard John LaRue say, “I need you to come on down to my office. I have a couple of men I want you to meet. They’re oilmen and relatively new in the game. They have some acreage leased and say they can raise the money to drill the wells. They need a geologist. I told them you were available.”
A few minutes later, Ray Holifield walked down the hall and shook hands for the first time with Max Williams and Irv Deal. Holifield was a chain smoker, dressed with all the aplomb of an absent-minded professor, and had holes in his shoes. If he had made any money at all, it was obvious that Ray Holifield had not wasted it on the finer things of life. He began putting two and two together in a hurry. Max Williams and Irv Deal both had companies, which were little more than one-man operations. One was a basketball player turned real estate broker, and the other happened to be one of the largest builders of apartments in the country. He often wondered if either of them understood the oil business well enough to really know the difference between logging and fracking a well and whether or not either of them had ever figured the intangible costs involved with sinking a hole.
They had obviously made a lot of money, and their shoes had stepped in a puddle or two of oil, but those intangible costs had jumped up unexpectedly and far too often. They broke a lot of men. A genuine novice in the oil game was always one decision away from potential disaster. Holifield was staring at two genuine novices.
The geologist looked at Max Williams and Irv Deal with unwavering eyes and asked
