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Prize Pop. No oilman is scared by the long odds. Amerada's Alfred Jacobsen, one of the industry's great pioneers in scientific oil exploration (TIME, March 24), decided to chance it in the Williston Basin, after other oilmen had been drilling there sporadically and futilely for about 30 years. Jacobsen drilled to 11,000 ft. before discovering that "core samples," removed at 8,000 ft., indicated the presence of oil. By a new technique (using hydrochloric acid to flush oil out of close-pored limestone), Jacobsen found the oil that others had missed, and the great Williston rush was on.
Since then, lease prices have risen from 10¢ an acre to as high as $235. Such famed wildcatters as Texas' H. L. Hunt, often called "the richest oilman in the world," and Hugh Roy Cullen hustled in to get in on the play. Centers of the drilling, e.g., Glendive, Mont, and Williston, N.D., burst at the seams.
In Bismarck, N.D., where dozens of oil companies have now set up offices, April saw the biggest gain in business (12%) of any city in the U.S. Nobody yet knows how vast the basin's oil pools may be, but Amerada, Shell, Texaco and others have already brought in wells as far as 115 miles apart. Since oil has also been found across the Canadian border in Saskatchewan, oilmen suspect that the Williston pool extends there, think they may find fields rivaling Alberta's great Leduc and Redwater fields.
Excitement at Abner's. Alabama had never thought of itself as big oil country until last January, when Standard of New Jersey's subsidiary, Humble Oil, brought in the state's first gusher on the cotton farm of Allen Moye. In short order, two other producing wells were brought in nearby. Last fortnight the fourth came in on L. G. Crosby's farm. Last week land could not be bought in the area for any price. There is talk that the new pool may reach far into Georgia on the east and Florida on the south, and wildcatters are setting up new rigs to find out.
Even in oil-rich West Texas, the area around Midland (pop. 34,256) had once given up hopes for oil. The land had been drilled repeatedly without luck. In 1943, Seaboard Oil found a promising rock formation, but no oil, on Abner Spraberry's farm. Not until 1948 did Wildcatter Arthur ("Tex") Harvey discover that the "Spraberry Trend," as the formation was named, was full of oil, though imprisoned in the fine-grained, hard-packed sands. Then, the new techniques of the industry came into play: soap & kerosene, pumped into the sandstone under tremendous pressure, loosened it enough to force the oil out. Last week Spraberry was the biggest single U.S. oil-drilling area; about one-fourteenth of the rigs in the country were drilling there, and 1,000 wells have already been completed. New rigs are rising at the rate of six a day. Farmer Spraberry and his wife have long since moved into town to live a life of ease on royalties.