Word: williston
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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...
...Squeeze. The spot picked was on the farm of Clarence Iverson, 30 miles northeast of Williston. By the time Amerada had hired the crew of drillers, it had spent more than $500,000 just for geophysical work and leases. By the time the well was down to 11,700 ft., it had spent another $500,000. On April 5, 1951, the Iverson discovery well came in and North Dakota became the 27th U.S. state to yield...
...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...