Word: basins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Although Amerada still has the biggest block of producing acreage (it has leases on 1,500,000,acres in all) in the basin, it now has plenty of company. Most of the major U.S. oil companies, plus most of the top independent wildcatters, have rigs towering all over the basin, from 100 miles east of Bismarck to eastern Montana, where Shell Oil and Texaco discovered two rich fields near Richey and Glendive. In this big oil play, there are more than 80 drilling rigs and 120 exploration crews probing the Williston Basin...
...boom has none of the bawdy, big-spending glitter of oilfields of a bygone era. The basin's chief invaders are the drilling crews, who brought their families and live in the trailer cities that dot the crossroads (see NEWS IN PICTURES). Hotel lobbies and restaurants hum with brokers hawking leases and mineral rights, but there is little oldtime roistering...
...basin, the oil companies are already spending an estimated $100 million a year. A Standard of Indiana subsidiary is planning a pipeline to Mandan, across the Missouri River from Bismarck, and Standard itself will build a 15,000-bbl-a-day refinery. Amerada will have to put up a multimillion-dollar plant to take natural gasoline out of the gas now being "flared" (i.e., burned) at the well. Enthusiastic businessmen predict that a prairie empire of chemicals and synthetics, rivaling the Gulf Coast's, will rise from these new sources of raw materials. So far, lack of transportation...
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...