—hadn’t changed. Anthony Lucas would have known with a single look what Steven Radley was doing, and why. The difference is that, while Lucas was convinced he could find large reservoirs of oil, Radley wasn’t looking for anything but dregs.
Most oilmen focus on discovering and extracting deposits that haven’t yet been found or tapped into. From the speculators buying up land around Beaumont in 1901 to multinational corporations using sophisticated seismic imaging off the coast of Brazil, the purpose of the game is to secure a prize that can justify the vast up-front investment.
Eventually, though, the returns begin to diminish, and the expense of reconfiguring and maintaining existing wells—not to mention sinking new ones—is no longer justified by the declining revenue coming out of the field. It’s at that point that an oil company abandons a place. Not when the oil is completely gone, but when there’s too little of it to be worth the effort.
Such a field becomes known as a
“I don’t have a lot of overhead,” Radley told me. “We do things the least expensive way possible. I’ve got it down to where I don’t think anyone can drill cheaper than we do.”
He started drawing lines in the sand, counting off the strikes against big oil companies. They had CEOs, and executives, and lawyers on staff, and on and on. In contrast, Radley’s corporate structure was uncomplicated: He owned 40 percent of the company, and his father owned the rest. And unlike the chief executives and board members of, say, ExxonMobil, Radley and his dad were their own middle management and technical staff, working their own leases every day. Radley’s wife ran the office, and his son worked for the company as well. (The roughnecks were freelancers.)
Radley’s other trick was to avoid rental and contractor fees by owning his own oil rig. Usually, a small operation like this would contract the drilling to someone else. But not Radley.
“That’s mine!” he said, pointing at the drilling rig. “That bulldozer, that’s mine! Everything out here is mine! That’s why I can make it on a five-barrel well. And we do our own geology.”
This meant they saved money by forgoing sophisticated geophysical analysis, like seismic reflection or gravity surveys. Instead, they used a simpler method. Radley demonstrated it for me by scratching his head and then pointing at a spot on the ground.
“This looks good!” he said.
By eleven in the morning, we were 250 feet deep and settling into the rhythm of the work. The rig’s engine would rev up, and the section of drilling pipe would descend into the ground, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, depending on the character of sand or rock the bit was working through. Once the section of pipe had fully descended, it was time to detach the power swivel, pull another piece of heavy pipe off the rack, hoist it upright, and thread it into the string. One of the roughnecks would reattach the power swivel to the top of it all, and then drilling would begin again.
It wasn’t easy work. The roughnecks were in constant motion, guiding the new lengths of pipe into place, making sure they sat correctly, spraying excess mud off the drilling platform with a hose, readying the next stage of pipe. Radley timed the intervals between stages of drilling, to see how efficient his workers were in the changeover. “About three minutes,” he said. “Pretty good.”
This was Radley in the role of both “pusher” and “company man,” the two people whose job on a well is to make sure that it gets drilled without wasting time or money. And if Radley was a bit casual as a pusher, that was only because he knew and trusted his crew. The most important thing, in his view, was that he manage the well in person.
“On those big rigs,” he said, “the pusher’s in a trailer, he’s got screens with pressure, drill speed, temperature, how many feet per minute, per hour, or whatever. And he just sits there and watches the screens.”
He shook his head. “To me, that’s not drilling. That’s
Section after section of the drill string descended into the ground, and we got bored. Radley and I hopped into his truck and took a spin around the lease. He had owned oil wells in one form or another since he was fifteen years old, when his father had encouraged him to invest in one. His father had been working his own small-time wells on the weekends and after hours from his job as an electrical contractor. Radley had started going along to help when he was still a little boy. It was all part of the world of Little Oil, in which it was completely reasonable for a teenager to buy his own share in a well, and where a mom-and-pop company could end up with the mineral rights to the oil field that sparked the petroleum revolution.
The problem with sinking wells is that it’s hard to tell which will produce and which won’t. We passed a nearby well that wasn’t producing anything; eighty feet farther was one that yielded four or five barrels of oil a day—and fifty of water. The small, lazy rocking horse of the pump dipped up and down as we drove by. Radley told me that just on the other side there was a well that produced even less oil, but more water. The area was all fractured, he explained. The ground was still shifting. It was impossible to know exactly where the oil was, in what direction it wanted to seep, and where the blockages were. Even Lucas No. 1 would have come up dry if it had been drilled fifty feet away.
“Oh, I would love to go down one of them holes,” Radley said. “We can’t know what’s down there.” It was only through deduction that he could become anything less than blind, piecing together an idea of what was going on at the business end of his drilling pipe, hundreds or thousands of feet underground.
We passed another well, and another. Radley estimated that he had thirty-five on the two leases he operated on Spindletop. Added to what he produced from a few other leases he owned, his company pumped about a hundred barrels of oil a day. I couldn’t decide whether that sounded like a lot. Was he making much money?
“I don’t even watch the price of oil anymore. I haven’t looked in three weeks,” he said. But of course he couldn’t ignore it completely. “At forty dollars a barrel, it’d be eating on me. When it was a hundred, hell yeah, I was happy. It’s a living. I ain’t gonna get rich.” He chuckled. “But I’m gonna eat real good.”
We headed back to the drill site, passing a wide pond. “You can fish in that water,” he said. “There’s bass. But they’re wormy.”
For a long time, Radley had had the area almost completely to himself. “It used to be we were the only ones out here,” he said. “It was literally just me, my dad, and my son.” But life on Spindletop had changed in recent years. There was a new wave of activity, and now perhaps a hundred people were working there on any given day. The natural gas business had landed.
But it wasn’t here to extract the stuff.
In a weird twist, the real action on Spindletop was no longer in taking fossil fuel out of the ground but in putting it back. For a range of economic and logistical reasons, natural gas companies need to store their product in large quantities, and creating caverns in underground salt formations is one of the best ways to do it. The huge salt dome underneath Spindletop, along the flank of which so much oil once collected, was now being hollowed out with caverns, each several hundred feet in diameter, thousands of feet tall, and more than half a mile underground. Gas storage companies planned to use them as impermeable storage tanks, each of which could hold billions of cubic feet of natural gas.
So the hill was a giant layer cake, divided for different purposes according to depth. The storage companies took the bottom layer, from about 6,000 to 2,500 feet belowground. From 1,500 on up was Radley’s territory, the specific depth for which he held the lease for extracting oil. Then, on top of it all, there was one last, tenuous layer.
“You see those orange fences over there?” Radley said when we were back at the drilling site. “Those are archaeologist playpens.”
The top several inches of soil on Spindletop were also being prospected—for historical evidence. A university archaeologist had fenced off the areas he thought most promising for his investigation of the early oil industry.
“It’s kinda neat being part of history,” Radley admitted. “The world changed right here.” But he took a dim view of the archaeologist, who Radley said hadn’t been coming to the site nearly often enough to get his work done—and get out. Meanwhile, Radley was supposed to stay out of the areas enclosed by the orange fences.
“I’ve got to get in there and drill a well,” he said, plainly annoyed. “I’m
