Texaco’s Deep Well Fuels Dreams for Oil in Midwest

Oilmen know it as the “basement,” a geologic depth that marks the age before oil--and most forms of life--existed.

So it seemed odd when Texaco constructed a red, white and blue 18-story rig on a hill two miles west of this north-central Kansas hamlet and started to drill deep into the “basement” in search of oil.

Motorists began taking gravel-road detours to see the huge apparatus, which soon became a lone beacon of hope to land-owning farmers on this economically depressed plain.

When Texaco capped the hole last month, it also capped fledgling talk among farmers about “gushers” and preparations by civic leaders for a northern Kansas oil rush. And the well seemed destined to be remembered only as the deepest dry hole ever drilled in Kansas.

But no one is calling Texaco’s $4-million well a failure. Texaco has not abandoned its leases in the area; in fact, it has been acquiring additional mineral rights. Other oil companies also have been snapping up mineral rights under millions of acres of land along a deep subterranean rift that stretches from Kansas to Lake Superior. In Iowa alone, it has been reported that the lease payments--usually about $1 per acre, per year--are pumping about $1 million into the economy annually.

The flurry of activity along the rift makes it “the biggest oil play on land in the country--if not the world right now--and nobody knows if they’ll make a nickel on it,” said Don Steeples, associate director for research at the Kansas Geological Survey.

The reason is that geologists still believe that the rift could be hiding some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Texaco’s dry well is “certainly not the end of it,” Steeples said. Even though they abandoned the well, “that doesn’t mean no oil was found.”

Oil company geologists predict that more wells will be drilled along the rift. And Texaco does not rule out more drilling of its own. While the company has no current plans to try again, “I would say ‘current’ plans, versus ‘no plans,’ ” said John A. Masson, a Texaco spokesman in Denver.

Much depends on what Texaco saw when it peeked at underground formations older than any ever explored in North America. Texaco says only that it found “no commercial quantities” of oil. But did it find signs that the “basement” could be the attic of a new energy frontier? Information about the well has been so scanty that one farmer posted a sign outside the security gate saying: “Texaco knows, but they ain’t telling.”

Reasons for Optimism

History holds the best reasons for optimism. Five hundred dry wells were drilled in the Overthrust Belt, a major oil-producing region in the Rocky Mountains, before commercial quantities of oil and gas were found. Fifty dry holes were drilled in the North Sea before a strike.

Texaco’s well was exploring just one part of a crescent-shaped, geological rift that stretches from north-central Kansas across southeast Nebraska, through Iowa, eastern Minnesota (including Minneapolis), northwestern Wisconsin and the western edge of Lake Superior. It ranges from 30 miles to 100 miles wide and from two to five miles deep.

Called the Mid-Continent Rift System, it was formed 1.3 billion years ago when the continent began to split apart--the same process by which the Earth’s oceans were created. For reasons scientists do not yet understand, the rift stopped splitting and filled with rocks and sediments.

Details about the rift have emerged in recent years and geologists say it contains enormous upside-down bowls of the type that have held large reservoirs of oil and gas elsewhere.

Ancient Sediments

But the bowls are in the midst of sediments 1.1 billion years old--too old, geologists long thought, to be hiding places for petroleum because there was so little life on Earth when they were formed. Most geologists believe oil was created when plant and animal life was exposed to a special combination of heat and pressure.

The Midwest, though, was in tropical latitudes at the time, and primitive life may have flourished in the deep lakes that filled the rift. Drilling in at least two formations of similar age--the Amadeus basin of Australia and the Irkutsk basin of Siberia--is producing commercial quantities of oil.

If oil exists in the Mid-Continent Rift, the underground structures suggest that it could be in huge quantities. Such a find could help reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and free it from the high costs and pollution of that other energy frontier--offshore drilling.

“There are structures in there between Kansas and Minnesota the size of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay,” one of North America’s largest oil reservoirs, Steeples said. But similar structures have been found on the continent, and they turned up empty. “The only way to know is to drill,” Steeples said.

Risky, Expensive

Searching for oil can be both risky and expensive. When a $30-million Texaco well off the New Jersey coast found traces of hydrocarbons, for example, oil companies spent more than $3 billion and drilled 46 holes into the seabed below the Atlantic--without finding commercial quantities of oil.

For a scientist, though, the rift system “is just as exciting as it ever was,” said Sydney Kaufman, a Cornell geophysicist and director of the Consortium for Continental Reflections Profiling, or COCORP.

COCORP, a Cornell-based program to study the structure of the deep crust of the Earth, made the discovery a few years ago that piqued the interest of oil companies. Scientists at first thought the rift was filled with lava, which would have destroyed plant and animal remains that might otherwise have turned to oil. But COCORP tests indicated the rift was filled with layered rock--with the sorts of formations that might have trapped oil.

No sizable amounts of oil have ever been discovered in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota or this part of Kansas, and most of the productive wells in Kansas have been 5,000 feet deep or less, well above the “basement.” Texaco’s well went 11,300 feet--a half mile deeper than the Kansas drilling record for oil and far into the basement.

“We found some interesting things down there, but it may not be the panacea you need for a big oil boom in Kansas,” said John A. Masson, a Texaco spokesman in Denver. “We are doing considerably more work on the data that was obtained from the well and are evaluating the geological implications.”

The Texaco well had become a symbol of hope for a region squeezed by the rising costs of farming and falling prices for farm products.

Long before Texaco arrived, that hill and the 260-acre dairy farm were a special place for Noel and Georgena Poersch. It was a good place to rear children, the creek was ideal for wading and the fields were good for hunting.

“We used to go up there for solitude,” Mrs. Poersch said.

When Texaco said they wanted to drill on that spot, the Poersches did not hesitate to say yes, but they were not prepared for what rose outside their living room window.

“We thought they’d clear a little patch of ground and put up a windmill-type thing, you know,” Mrs. Poersch said. “We didn’t have any idea it would be so big.”

Biggest Rig in Kansas

Texaco put a fence around 13 acres of the Poersch land and put up the rig, the biggest ever erected in Kansas.

“They told us it was a big risk before they started in, so we didn’t build our hopes too high,” Mrs. Poersch said. “But we hope they don’t give up completely.”

Texaco has tried to derail the oil rush fever, which tends to raise the amount of money that farmers demand for mineral rights on their land. But when a company with Texaco’s research expertise is investing several million dollars--more than the entire annual exploration budgets of many independent oil companies--even oil-prospecting veterans tend to be optimistic.

The rig’s presence here, an area that even during Kansas’ oil boom days of the 1950s was not a fruitful location for drilling, certainly triggered interest among farmers.

Civic leaders in the area, about 60 miles north of Manhattan and Interstate 70, had visions of station wagons--station wagons full of families moving here to partake in the oil boom. They even met to discuss how they might handle a sudden influx of new residents.

“When you’re wondering how to pay the mortgage and someone talks oil wells, you get something like gold fever,” Masson said.