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, a pump jack was quickly installed, but the City of Giddings well was only coughing up five barrels a day, ten barrels if the crew got lucky, and luck had always been a stranger in the gardens of chalk. The mother had lost its lode.
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
