Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
him to invest in one. His father had been working his own small-time wells on the week-
ends and after hours from his job as an electrical contractor. Radley had started going along
to help when he was still a little boy. It was all part of the world of Little Oil, in which
it was completely reasonable for a teenager to buy his own share in a well, and where a
mom-and-pop company could end up with the mineral rights to the oil field that sparked
the petroleum revolution.
The problem with sinking wells is that it's hard to tell which will produce and which
won't. We passed a nearby well that wasn't producing anything; eighty feet farther was one
that yielded four or five barrels of oil a day—and fifty of water. The small, lazy rocking
horse of the pump dipped up and down as we drove by. Radley told me that just on the
other side there was a well that produced even less oil, but more water. The area was all
fractured, he explained. The ground was still shifting. It was impossible to know exactly
where the oil was, in what direction it wanted to seep, and where the blockages were. Even
Lucas No. 1 would have come up dry if it had been drilled fifty feet away.
“Oh, I would love to go down one of them holes,” Radley said. “We can't know what's
down there.” It was only through deduction that he could become anything less than blind,
piecing together an idea of what was going on at the business end of his drilling pipe, hun-
dreds or thousands of feet underground.
We passed another well, and another. Radley estimated that he had thirty-five on the two
leases he operated on Spindletop. Added to what he produced from a few other leases he
owned, his company pumped about a hundred barrels of oil a day. I couldn't decide wheth-
er that sounded like a lot. Was he making much money?
“I don't even watch the price of oil anymore. I haven't looked in three weeks,” he said.
But of course he couldn't ignore it completely. “At forty dollars a barrel, it'd be eating on
me. When it was a hundred, hell yeah, I was happy. It's a living. I ain't gonna get rich.” He
chuckled. “But I'm gonna eat real good.”
We headed back to the drill site, passing a wide pond. “You can fish in that water,” he
said. “There's bass. But they're wormy.”
For a long time, Radley had had the area almost completely to himself. “It used to be we
were the only ones out here,” he said. “It was literally just me, my dad, and my son.” But
life on Spindletop had changed in recent years. There was a new wave of activity, and now
perhaps a hundred people were working there on any given day. The natural gas business
had landed.
But it wasn't here to extract the stuff.
In a weird twist, the real action on Spindletop was no longer in taking fossil fuel out of
the ground but in putting it back. For a range of economic and logistical reasons, natural
