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Although Amerada still has the biggest block of producing acreage (it has leases on 1,500,000,acres in all) in the basin, it now has plenty of company. Most of the major U.S. oil companies, plus most of the top independent wildcatters, have rigs towering all over the basin, from 100 miles east of Bismarck to eastern Montana, where Shell Oil and Texaco discovered two rich fields near Richey and Glendive. In this big oil play, there are more than 80 drilling rigs and 120 exploration crews probing the Williston Basin for oil.
The boom has none of the bawdy, big-spending glitter of oilfields of a bygone era. The basin's chief invaders are the drilling crews, who brought their families and live in the trailer cities that dot the crossroads (see NEWS IN PICTURES). Hotel lobbies and restaurants hum with brokers hawking leases and mineral rights, but there is little oldtime roistering.
In the basin, the oil companies are already spending an estimated $100 million a year. A Standard of Indiana subsidiary is planning a pipeline to Mandan, across the Missouri River from Bismarck, and Standard itself will build a 15,000-bbl-a-day refinery. Amerada will have to put up a multimillion-dollar plant to take natural gasoline out of the gas now being "flared" (i.e., burned) at the well. Enthusiastic businessmen predict that a prairie empire of chemicals and synthetics, rivaling the Gulf Coast's, will rise from these new sources of raw materials. So far, lack of transportation has held the flow of oil to a mere trickle, only 10,000 bbls. a day. But Jacobsen estimates that its productive capacity will reach 100,000 bbls. a day within five years. The full extent of the Williston Basin's reserves will not be known until thousands of square miles, as yet untouched, are drilled. Estimates of oil in the basin run from 500 million bbls.—and up—compared to reserves of more than 2 billion in the great East Texas field, the richest ever found in the U.S.
Success in the Williston Basin is far from Amerada's sole claim to fame, though it has proved so exciting to Wall Street that stocks only vaguely associated with Williston have spurted like a new gusher. Three months ago Amerada brought in a new discovery well in Alberta's Peace River area which Jacobsen says may have great possibilities. Cautiously, he says it is too early to estimate the size of the new find, and adds that the Peace River area "may prove to be a pain in the neck or something really big." And only two weeks ago, in Texas' Yoakum County, Amerada's drillers brought in still another new field. It was not a very big one, but it is the sort of new field that Jacobsen calls Amerada's "bread & butter."
Easy Work. Wildcatting for oil, Jacobsen likes to say, is the easiest thing in the world: "You can make millions and millions. All you need is a checkbook—and money in the bank. You can get a competent drilling contractor to do all the work for you and you wouldn't even have to go near the place you were drilling. All you'd have to do is pick the place to drill."