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These days there are other wildcatters running tiny public companies investing in places like Peru and the Caspian Sea, but no one else is negotiating with sovereign governments for million-acre leases on Van Dyke's scale. On a trip to Libreville, Gabon Van Dyke shook hands with President Omar Bongo, in power since 1967 and one of the most entrenched rulers in the world. Van Dyke has signed similar leases for the right to look for oil with the leaders of Morocco, the Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and Madagascar.
What's it like for a teacher's son from Normal, Ill., to deal with the notorious strongmen of Africa? "I've been doing the same thing for 50 years," he says with a shrug. "Just a bigger scale. Same damn thing." Having picked up a degree in geological engineering from the University of Oklahoma, Van Dyke got his start in the dusty fields of Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1951. His mentor, wildcatter S.D. Johnson, taught him the basics: find a farmer with promising land and get him to lease you the rights, then find an oil company willing to drill. Van Dyke hitchhiked to Fort Worth and Dallas to make his first deals. "I had about $500 to my name," he says. "I slept in whorehouses." He had no capital to invest in drilling, so he put the farmers and the oil companies together, typing the contracts on a portable typewriter on the hood of his rental car. His strength was making a deal look good, or as friend and fellow oilman Denny Bartell says, he had an ability to "powder the pig." Van Dyke would often keep a small percentage interest, but he was usually out of the operation before drilling began. "The first year, I made about $40,000, and that was 1952," he says. "I didn't find a barrel of oil."
When West Texas got played out, Van Dyke took that dealmaking skill to the Gulf of Mexico. His finds were modest but rich enough to allow him to play the role of Texas oilman to the hilt. In 1969, when a man might pay $25,000 for a nice house in a decent neighborhood, Van Dyke spent $1 million for a house that he later embellished with a 1-acre man-made "lake."
Wildcatting as he knew it, however, had started to disappear. In the 1970s, wildcatters flocked to places like Idaho, the Dakotas and Appalachia, but left the big plays to the majors. Oil exploration had moved into the open ocean, and the high costs shut out most independents. But while other wildcatters became investors or consultants or began specializing in "strip wells" that draw oil out from nearly depleted wells, Van Dyke decided to go for broke, launching a bid to become an international deepwater wildcatter in the North Sea in 1973. The gamble paid off with another modest find--60 million bbl. off the coast of the Netherlands--and allowed Van Dyke to be part of the development of deepwater exploration technology, such as 2-D and 3-D seismic analysis, during the 1980s and '90s. Most wildcatters operate with a success rate of less than 10%. By pinpointing promising fields with 3-D seismic analysis, Van Dyke thinks he can improve the likelihood of a find closer to 20%.