Word: amerada
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...reason was that Amerada pioneered and perfected the scientific geophysical methods now in general use for finding oil. It has since kept a bit ahead of most oil companies in their use. Says Jacobsen: "I guess we manage to squeeze a little bit more information out of our maps." On the other hand, he adds, "we found oil in the Williston Basin with the same men and the same methods with which we missed it in other places that looked just as good. In the end, to find oil, you still have to drill a well...
...that his work is his consuming interest. He usually spends Saturday and Sunday in his Manhattan office because "I can get more work done when I'm alone." He has no social life, shuns the theater, movies, TV, but is a wide reader. A wealthy man (his Amerada stock alone is worth $8,000,000), he makes no show of it, wears a somber uniform of dark clothes, has no car, shuttles to his Manhattan office by subway from the staid old Plaza Hotel, where he has lived for 25 years. "I'm not gregarious," he says...
Bargains & Coups. After surveying the U.S. and Canada, De Golyer decided that the best prospects for Amerada were in Texas. But only U.S.-owned companies could drill there. So the Cowdray family split its 60% ownership in half, and let Wall Street's Dillon, Read & Co. sell half the stock on the U.S. market at $26 a share.* Amerada went into Texas and found oil from the start. With their growing geophysical skill, Jacobsen and De Golyer were so confident of finding oil that when Louisiana Land & Exploration asked them to "shoot" (i.e., prospect) its holdings along the Louisiana...
Jacobsen took over Amerada's presidency in 1929, when De Golyer stepped up to chairman.† He quickly made a series of shrewd deals (e.g., he bought 160 acres in California's Kettleman Hills for $200,000, sat by while others drilled, sold an undivided half interest in his lease for $8,600,000 after another company found oil), built up the cash Amerada needed to expand its oil hunting...
Thus, when the Depression hit, Amerada had an additional $9,000,000 in cash in its treasury, was able to start exploration and drilling in a number of new areas while others pulled in their drills. With so big a stake to bet, Jacobsen was able to take bigger & bigger risks, and, as he says, "We were lucky." But other companies that had the benefit of the same geophysical methods found little but dry holes. Amerada's greatest luck seemed to be the fact that it had Jacobsen. Amerada's net profit rose from...