Word: amerada
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Success in the Williston Basin is far from Amerada's sole claim to fame, though it has proved so exciting to Wall Street that stocks only vaguely associated with Williston have spurted like a new gusher. Three months ago Amerada brought in a new discovery well in Alberta's Peace River area which Jacobsen says may have great possibilities. Cautiously, he says it is too early to estimate the size of the new find, and adds that the Peace River area "may prove to be a pain in the neck or something really big." And only two weeks...
Once, picking the spot was fairly easy and cheap. Wildcatters drilled where they could find oil seeping from the ground. Now, drilling for oil is highly complicated and expensive, especially the way Amerada does it. Oilmen have suspected for years that there was oil in the Williston Basin. A saucerlike underground formation, the basin is composed of sedimentary strata which were once the bottom of a prehistoric sea-the type of formation in which oil is found...
...could find oil in the Williston. After independent wildcatters had failed. Standard of California tried its luck in 1938. It went down 10,281 ft. before it gave up. Then in 1946 Amerada got interested. In buying a block of leases it got some that Standard had let lapse on the area known as the Nesson Anticline (see chart), a gently sloping dome of rock. (The surface anticline, i.e., an upward fold of porous rock, often indicates a similar undergound dome under which oil frequently is imprisoned.) With the first batch of leases in its pocket, Amerada sent brokers...
...setting off dynamite in them, the geophysicists could time the shock waves through the ground, thus guess at the type of rock, shale or sand strata through which the waves were passing. For four years the teams mapped the area. Then the results were studied for months by Amerada's Dr. Benjamin B. Weatherby, one of the top geophysicists of the industry...
...time for Jacobsen & Co. to weigh all the geologic and other factors and make the final decision to drill. The big work was preparing the maps and locating the possible oil-bearing area; picking the spot to drill was easy. Says Jacobsen: "Any office boy at Amerada could have done that because you drill in the peak of the dome. As long as you stay in that area you could pick your spot by the Sam Weaver method...