Word: dykes
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...rival such gushers as Alaska's North Slope or Britain's North Sea? One might think the giant oil companies have the answer. But the biggest customers of all are turning to a 79-year-old Texan who operates like the Indiana Jones of the oil patch. Gene Van Dyke is one of the last of the wildcatters, independent operators who roam jungles and deserts looking for black gold. He has become the man to see if you need millions of barrels of crude oil a day to fuel a booming industrializing country, which is why the rough-hewn geologist...
That's where Van Dyke believes the world's next great oil field lies. He is now the largest deepwater license holder in Africa, with 20 million acres under license, an area equivalent to 70% of the Gulf of Mexico's deepwater fields. He believes that the region could hold as much as 100 billion bbl., equal to the reserves of such oil powers as Iran or Kuwait. Now wealthy partners are lining up to pay the cost of drilling exploratory wells, which runs into the tens of millions per try. "The Chinese and Indians, they're the ones that...
...Dyke has always liked to walk on the wild side. Ten years ago, when he started nosing around West Africa, the price of oil was only $20 per bbl. His friends thought he was crazy sinking money into leases with untested, unstable countries. Today, with a barrel of crude at close to triple that price, demand soaring and experts sounding alarms about depleting reserves, the majors are following Van Dyke's lead. In the offices of Houston-based Vanco Energy Corp., of which Van Dyke is chairman, you can see where this wildcatter is placing his bets. African tribal masks...
These days there are other wildcatters running tiny public companies investing in places like Peru and the Caspian Sea, but no one else is negotiating with sovereign governments for million-acre leases on Van Dyke's scale. On a trip to Libreville, Gabon Van Dyke shook hands with President Omar Bongo, in power since 1967 and one of the most entrenched rulers in the world. Van Dyke has signed similar leases for the right to look for oil with the leaders of Morocco, the Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and Madagascar...
...from Normal, Ill., to deal with the notorious strongmen of Africa? "I've been doing the same thing for 50 years," he says with a shrug. "Just a bigger scale. Same damn thing." Having picked up a degree in geological engineering from the University of Oklahoma, Van Dyke got his start in the dusty fields of Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1951. His mentor, wildcatter S.D. Johnson, taught him the basics: find a farmer with promising land and get him to lease you the rights, then find an oil company willing to drill. Van Dyke hitchhiked to Fort Worth and Dallas...