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The Mountain Boys. Denver is the center of the eleven-state Rocky Mountain Region, which was flooded by prehistoric seas that once covered most of the U.S. and laid down the oil-bearing strata along its shore and on its bottom. One Denver geologist talks sweepingly of "a great underground river of oil flowing from Northern Alberta to the Rio Grande." More than $130 million was spent in the area last year tapping the "river." Refineries are being expanded and new ones built; new pipelines are fanning across the mountains.
In two years, Texaco, Ohio Oil and Bay Petroleum have all put up new office buildings in Denver. Big new reserves have been turned up in Wyoming's Pow der River and Big Horn basins. Promising finds are being developed in the Ute country of adjoining Utah, where the hunt for oil had once been abandoned. But Salt Lake's determined Wildcatter J. L. (Mike) Dougan kept on trying, despite a heartbreaking series of dry holes. Finally, after two years, he brought in Utah's first commercial well. But that wasn't the end of his heartbreak. The oil is so full of wax that it is like Vaseline. But experts found that heating the well's pipes for its last 1,200 ft. would make the oil flow. Now the major oil companies have leases in the basin, have proved up four producing fields (Ashley Valley, Red Wash, Roosevelt Pool, Duchesne).
Denver's own Denver-Julesburg basin, where oil is found at such relatively shallow depths (3,000 -6,500 ft.), is a driller's paradise. Sterling, Col., where British-American oil brought in the discovery well two years ago, has since jumped in population from 7,470 to more than 10,000, and 160 more producing wells have been brought in.
No Substitutes. Along with the new fields, the industry's greater knowledge and growing technology have enabled it to get still more production out of oil fields. Some, like California's Ventura, had been thought exhausted. Shell has proved up new reserves by drilling its old Ventura wells deeper. Oilmen are now drilling through the bottom of old wells in South Texas, looking for deeper pay sands. Use of gravity-meters and perfected seismograph techniques now enable prospectors to pinpoint formations which could contain oil. But to find out whether oil is there, no substitute has been found for the old-fashioned gamble of sinking a drill. Thanks to the tenacity of such gamblers as Jacobsen, Hunt and countless independent wildcatters, the industry is now finding it almost everywhere.