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For six weeks, a crew of red-suited blowout experts battled to cap the wild well. A crane removing a ten-ton piece of wellhead plumbing was smashed like a Tinkertoy, when the gas jet tossed the load into the air. The crew succeeded in diverting the gas to an open pit, where they set it ablaze to prevent an accidental explosion. By the end of September, workers managed to pipe the gas through a purifying plant and into a pipeline, through which it flowed at an uncontrolled rate of 140 million cu. ft. per day. Says Chevron's Exploration Manager David Johnson: "If we had tried to shut it off, the gas would have blown the control equipment out of the hole."
Eventually, the workers pumped enough drillers' mud into the well to stop the flow of gas and permit the installation of proper wellhead equipment. Next year the well will go on stream at a manageable 20 million cu. ft. per day, six times the volume of a typical south Louisiana well and enough to meet the daily needs of 61,000 American homes.
The Parlange strike and an earlier successful Chevron well called the No. 1 Alma Plantation have touched off fresh waves of leasing and prospecting activity. Altogether, major oil companies and independents have leased more than 1.8 million acres. Some landowners got as much as $350 an acre and a one-third share in future production. The state of Louisiana, controlling 5 million acres, leased land on the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain for $324 an acre and a choice site elsewhere at $1,500 an acre in competitive bidding. So far, the Tuscaloosa Sand has yielded 14 producing or potentially producing wells.
The new discoveries have significant implications for gas consumers nationwide as well as for Louisiana, where one worker in twelve draws his paycheck from an energy company. A recent report to the Governor of Louisiana estimated that 85% of the state's potential oil-and gas-producing deposits have not yet been drilled, but most of the unexplored reserves are very deep and difficult to find, as in the Tuscaloosa Sand. There the wells are four times as deep as the average U.S. well. Drilling one costs about $5 million if it is a producer, almost as much if it is a dry hole—and dry holes outnumber the producers 3 or 4 to 1. Louisiana officials argue that the heavy costs will require higher prices for interstate gas, which is now federally price controlled at $1.47 per 1,000 cu. ft., v. an average $1.85 on Louisiana's intrastate free market. Even at that price, Louisiana last year piped 75% of its gas to other states; higher prices could attract still more of the gas into interstate pipelines.
While the search for gas in the Tuscaloosa Sand is being conducted mostly by private business, the U.S. Department of Energy is providing funds to assemble information on the Gulf Coast's geopressured zones. In theory, the water from these zones, emerging at a wellhead pressure of 6,000 lbs. per sq. in. and a temperature much above boiling, could spin turbines and yield heat for such purposes as oil refining, food processing and rice drying. The gas that is dissolved underground in the hot water fizzes out of solution at atmospheric pressure to be captured for fuel. The billion-dollar question is whether all this can be done at an economic cost.