thousand hardy souls who endured a life that had always depended on the land – cotton farms and horse ranches long before oil was ever squeezed from the crevices in the Austin Chalk.
Max Williams was not timid about leaving his own imprint in the field. Ed Cox was moving his operation into the area, and Windsor/U.S. immediately dispatched Randy Stewart to Pearsall. His mission had not changed. Find land. And lease it.
Stewart drove to the Frio County Abstract Office, hid himself away in the clerk’s records room, and began searching through oil and gas leases for names of landowners. He spent the nights in Devine, the closest town with a motel.
He was in a little café late one night, eating alone, as usual, and he heard raucous noise and laughter coming from the far corner of the dining room. Two men, obviously of Mexican heritage, had been drinking far too long, and each new word they uttered was louder and more profane than the last. They may not have been raising hell, but hell was simmering near the surface. One of them turned around and noticed Stewart. He waved. Come on over and have a drink with us, he said, his words slurred.
Stewart did. He was afraid not to join them. And Randy Stewart came face to face with the Trevino brothers. Good men. Hard working men. They owned a grocery store in Pearsall. And, more importantly, they owned fifty acres of land. By midnight, Stewart had leased all fifty acres sight unseen. It wasn’t until the next day that he found out the land was wedged next to the city dump. It did not matter. Windsor/U.S. had land where they could drill their first well in the chalk. In time, Stewart was able to patch together leases on almost two thousand acres, just enough land to hold twenty wells if Max Williams had figured correctly.
Windsor/U.S. paid out ten dollars an acre, which, Williams and Deal thought, was pretty conservative, and they generously offered a twenty percent royalty on production. The company was relying on investors. It had not spent a great deal of its own money, and the farmers had earned a few unexpected dollars for land that seldom paid them anything. Irv Deal was handling the day-to-day business back in Dallas. Williams kept raising money, watching closely as their drilling crew dueled an unpredictable earth with time-worn, rock-battered drill bits. He was in and out of the field, managing investors, selling the deals, packaging the money, making the bets, and rolling the dice. Make it. Lose it. Throw it away. Whatever happened, his name was on the line, and Max Williams would have it no other way.
The drill bit tore into the fracture beneath the city dump. Thus began the struggle. From beginning to end, it was a fight. The oil came, but it did not come easy, and it came with a price.
Some in the oil patch described Max Williams, Irv Deal, and others as foolish for even daring to test the Austin Chalk. The firm of LaRue, Moore, and Schafer certainly did not recommend any kind of oil venture in the Pearsall region. The chalk was fickle. Demanding. Daunting. And erratic.
A lot of the wells in and around Pearsall had produced oil. No one disputed it. But no one, as of yet, had been able to bank any high-profit production. The miserly chalk, frankly, would not allow it. Max Williams and Irv Deal, however, had ignored the warnings and decided to take a chance. It was the first of their gambles in hard ground.
Both men believed that, with a little luck, they might be able to figure out the riddles of that ancient limestone formation. The oil must be down there somewhere in the chalk. Wildcatters had been catching tantalizing glimpses of it since 1930. Maybe those early day operators did not understand the formations or how to treat them properly. The formations were tight, and it was a slow, arduous process to merely cut through the chalk.
If the field had a chance to make it at all, Irv Deal told his partner, the team of LaRue, Moore, and Schafer might well make the difference. The Dallas firm certainly had a good reputation. The petroleum engineers knew what they were doing and how to do it. Besides, he and Williams now had access to a geologist of some renown named Ray Holifield. He had found oil in the deserts of the Middle East. Frio County was as much of a desert as any slab of distant sand in Saudi Arabia. Maybe it was time to let some seasoned professionals tackle the chalk.
Across Frio County, Randy Stewart kept securing the leases that Windsor/U.S. needed and handling the legal work. Strike deals with landowners. Track down the heirs, living and deceased. Make sure the titles were clear. Build a pad. Haul in a rig. Put a crew in place. Then the drill bit could begin chewing into the earth.
Once. Twice. Three times. Windsor/U.S. found wells that were fairly productive, not great by any means, but they did spit out a few dollars. There was not enough oil to make them rich, but enough to keep them going on.
Back in Dallas, Ray Holifield was sadly shaking his head. Windsor/U.S. was its wasting time, he said. Its time, and its money. Holifield had not yet trekked to Pearsall. He did not want his reputation, past or present, tainted and sullied by a field that had about as much life as a ghost town, one condemned with more chalk than oil. He could find locations all right, but he feared they would be a dead end. He kept meeting Irv Deal in his Dallas office and pleading with him: Get the hell out of Pearsall.
His logic was sound. If history were to be believed, and if history kept repeating itself, the chalk would ruin them. Williams and Deal had not yet grown wealthy in the Frio County field. But, then again, they had not been broken either.
The fractures in the chalk were small and narrow, some the size of blood vessels and veins. It was suggested that the wells could be fracked to make them larger. The method wasn’t guaranteed, but it had been known to sometimes work. Max Williams and Irv Deal decided that it might be wise to invest the money, and they met with a petroleum geologist who was in town preaching the gospel of a new fracking technique that just might turn Pearsall into a giant oil field.
Fred Skidmore was a self-styled geologist, a colorful character who claimed to be from South America and wore a .45 caliber pistol on his hip. He carefully outlined a new technology that had been developed to flush the oil from the fractures of the chalk in Pearsall. Skidmore said he could break open the limestone by pumping a lot of water under pressure and using a patented mixture of gel, sand, and mud to trigger a spectacular flow back. Oil was no longer a prisoner of the chalk. He had a convincing story, one that was simple enough for a pair of novices and more than a few veterans in the oil business to easily understand and embrace. Fred Skidmore went to work with his new method of fracking a well. His was a procedure designed to clear the faults by pulsating water at timed intervals in order to turn the frac as it blasted through the formation. Water slurry and gel were slammed down the wellbore and into the formation through perforations in the pipe. Pumped under massive pressure, the mixture cracked the rock. Pump for thirty minutes, Skidmore said, then stop. Launch the attack again, and, if theory happened to be correct, the artificial frac turned and went in another direction, seeking out faults and fractures wherever they might be hidden. It was a good plan. It was based on sound science. It did not work.
Max Williams, Randy Stewart, and the crew grouped around Skidmore to watch the flow back on their first well. The water shot out of the hole with a tremendous force. Cheers rattled through the afternoon. By night, the water was no longer shooting its gusher of hope. As Stewart said, “It was barely peeing out of the end of the pipe.” The men kept catching samples. They kept looking for oil. Only occasionally did they catch a trace. No one remembered the cheers.
Ray Holifield arrived in Pearsall late, selecting perforations on the last wells that Windsor/U.S. would drill in a faltering and cantankerous field. Until then, he said, his role primarily dealt with reviewing the production and economics of the wells that lay in hard, uncompromising ground. Holifield had absolutely no faith in the long-term benefits of the Austin Chalk in Pearsall. And he certainly had did not believe in Skidmore’s Kiel Frac technology, which had promised to crack the chalk and splash the ground with oil.
It had not been a technological breakthrough that would revolutionize a failing field.
