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Kayser grew worried about his men hunting gas on the Colorado Plateau while everyone else was panting after uranium. '' "If you didn't want them to get the fever," says Kayser, "you inoculated them with a little of it." The inoculation consisted, of forming a new company, Rare Metals Corp. of America, 55% owned by El Paso, 18% by Western Natural Gas Co. (an I affiliate) and 27% by officers and employees of the companies. Rare Metals opened a mercury plant in Idaho this fall and will have a reduction mill finished in Arizona late next spring.
El Paso now owns some 5 trillion cu.
ft. of gas reserves. Its gas sales are up from some 5.4 billion cu. ft. in 1930 to 645.4 billion last year; its net income has climbed from $282,500 to more than $12.3 million. It has made itself ready for expansion by drilling and then capping gas wells all over the Southeast. Yet not even this is enough for quick-thinking Kayser; things seldom move fast enough for him. "Sometimes," he once confided to a friend in a quiet moment, "I go over and take a trip through Carlsbad Caverns and think. 'This wasn't built in a day.' " But the impression never lasts long.