The great oil finder Harry Sinclair always liked to drill wildcats near cemeteries.  Like so many wildcatters, he trusted his “feel” as much as science when it came to finding oil.  Here is a picture that seems to prove his theory.

http://www.ericwilder.com

March is trying to go out like a lion.  Cells all over Oklahoma.

http://www.ericwilder.com

This is a very interesting and informative article.  Like many oil finds in the world, Oklahoma’s was near an oil seep, a surface indication of what’s present below the surface.  For those of you that like reading about the history of oil and gas, please enjoy this one.

Chronicles of Oklahoma.

http://www.ericwilder.com

There is a scene in my novel A Gathering of Diamonds where the protagonist, Tom Logan is deep in the Ouachita Mountains in search of his brother's missing journal.  He and teenage guide Mary Ann Stewart have spent the day, trekking steep paths and exploring caves, crevasses and mine shafts.  Taking a potty break, Tom ventures off the trail for a little privacy and finds himself surrounded by rattlesnakes.  The scene is fictional but, like a good fiction, has a basis in fact.

I attended geologic summer field camp in northern Arkansas, the terrain there similar to the Ouachita Mountains, but more eroded and less angular.  Joe Martinez, my mapping partner, asked me to climb a fairly steep slope to see if I could find the contact between two geologic formations.  Boulders, slumping down the hill, covered much of my path up the slope, along with lots of gravel that had sloughed off the slowly moving boulders.  I moved uphill quickly, my thoughts focused on locating a color change in the rock.  Finally I found it.

"I got it, Martinez," I yelled down the hill.  I didn't hear his answer as I used a marker to pinpoint the location on my topographic map.

I had found the contact just as a wall of rock halted my progress.  I didn't need to go any further because what I sought was right before my eyes.  What I felt at that moment was the elation of discovery.  When I turned back toward the valley, my euphoria turned to immediate dread.

I was on a flat plain of rock, standing amid a wad of snakes that stretched at least five feet in all directions.  The inert reptiles were huge, some thicker than my thighs.  When I saw a head protruding from the mass, I knew they were rattlers.  I had apparently walked across them in my zeal to find the outcrop contact (I know! It must seem like I'm making this up but every word is true.)

I tried to yell but my voice was locked deep in my throat.  Finally, I managed a squeaky call for help but Martinez was too far away to hear and there's nothing that he could have done anyway.  My heart was about to pound out of my chest as I searched my mind for a solution to my problem.  My back was pasted against the vertical wall of rock behind me.  The only way past the snakes was over them, a path I wasn’t prepared to take, even if I could have persuaded my legs to move.

I finally caught my breath and grabbed a loose rock from the wall behind me.  When I tossed it on the snakes, they didn't even move.  The next rock did the trick, causing the snakes to begin slithering away in all directions, providing a path of escape, one that I quickly took down the hill.  When I reached a large flat rock, I collapsed on my butt, refusing to move until my heart rate finally returned to normal.

The lethargic reptiles were sunning on the ledge, using sunlight to raise their temperatures - the reason that I didn't suffer the death of a thousand bites.  Still, it was lucky that I was young or I would probably have had a heart attack.

Unlike Tom Logan, I still don't have a terrible fear of snakes but I have had an experience or two that gave me the insight to describe a person that does.

http://www.ericwilder.com

This is a good article.  It highlights why natural gas prices are rising – 1) increased demand, 2) shrinking supply and, 3) large price inequity compared to other energy fuels.

Bloomberg.com: Energy.

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This is a very interesting article.  Yes, there are many factors these days affecting the price of oil and gas.  The speculators are in a tizzy, trying to get a handle on the volatile market place.  My own prediction is that natural gas prices will rise relative to the price of oil.  This is simply because you can buy more natural gas BTUs right now for the money than you can oil BTUs.  How much is natural gas really worth right now?  $17 MCF.  Yes, that’s how much it is undervalued.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Bloomberg.com: Energy.

In an interview with CNBC, Boone Pickens stated that natural gas should be used as a transportation fuel because it is cheap and abundant.  Pickens’ idea is a valid one, although oil shouldn’t be totally discarded as a transportation fuel.

The U.S. consumes about 25 million barrels of oil a day, six of which we produce ourselves.  About 52 percent of a barrel of oil goes into the refining of gasoline so we consume about 12.5 million barrels of oil a day for transportation needs (cars and trucks).  World demand and daily production of oil is around 85 million barrels of oil a day.

If we used natural gas to run even half our daily transportation needs, we could reduce our daily purchase of foreign oil by 6.25 million barrels of oil per day.  This would in turn reduce the world demand to 78.75 million barrels a day, 6.25 million barrels less than the world’s present daily needs.

This daily surplus of oil would result in an almost instant drop in the price of oil, probably below $50 a barrel.  The drop in domestic fuel prices would be less dramatic because the price of natural gas would surely increase.

We already have the technology to convert gasoline burning engines to natural gas burning engines.  The technology is safe and inexpensive.  While oil refiners might take an immediate economic hit, the rest of our economy would benefit, both locally and globally.

Boone Pickens has a great idea and I think it is time that we begin implementing it - or at least open the subject for a national debate.  This article written by Eric Wilder

http://www.ericwilder.com

Here is a well pic from Noble County, Oklahoma.  The crew is preparing to perforate the Herington Lime and the crew chief just yelled “fire in the hole.”

http://www.ericwilder.com

Some years ago, I was visiting Tulsa on business.  Tulsa is a gorgeous city in northeast Oklahoma.  A large river winds through it and it was one of the first cities in America that had walking, jogging and biking trails.  On a whim, I decided to return to Oklahoma City along a different path.

It was mid March, much like today in Oklahoma, and there was still a nip in the air left over from a recent snow storm.  Most of the snow had melted and now there was a warm breeze blowing in from the south as I followed the rural highway toward the little town of Red Rock.

Despite the recent snow, trees and flowers were beginning to bloom on both sides of the road.  Northeast Oklahoma is almost in the western foothills of the Ozarks, the terrain rolling and large boulders often appearing in the tiny streambeds that dissect the rolling terrain.

Red Rock is a small town, nay, a tiny town, I learned as I took an excursion off the highway.  Then I saw something quite out of the ordinary.  It was a very large building surrounded by acres of parking lots, filled with tour buses with licenses from all the surrounding states.

"They're here to play Indian bingo," a local told me.  "They give away thousands of dollars every week."

That morning in the Daily Oklahoman, OKC's newspaper, I had read about an old man that had disappeared in a snowstorm. As best as I can tell, he was never found.  That gorgeous morning, driving from Tulsa through Red Rock, I concocted a story about that old man to set it straight, at least in my own mind.

Why did he run away from home?  How did he survive?  Who might he have met along the way?  What was he searching for and what did he ultimately find?  I answered all these questions in my book Prairie Sunset and to this day, when I re-read it, the story still feels as real to me as that wonderful drive that I took from Tulsa to OKC that day, many years ago, just off the beaten path.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Here is an interesting article that partially explains one of the reasons for the steady increase in natural gas prices.  We only have control over what we produce in this country.  LNG is a commodity that we have to compete for with the rest of the world.  http://www.ericwilder.com

Bloomberg.com: Energy.

The domestic oil industry is populated by many types of people, both male and female, but it is safe to say that none of them could ever remotely be considered saints.  During my tenure in the business, I have met many of its denizens but the most colorful of all was a person named Harold (not his real name).  Harold, an OJT geophysist that had found a billion (I'm not exaggerating!) barrel oil field in Nigeria for Mobil Oil.  He was quite seriously, one of smartest persons I have ever met.  Unfortunately, he had a larcenous side.

Anne and I had a company in bankruptcy when Harold showed up on our doorstep, his own oil Company and 1600 acre Texas ranch in foreclosure.  He parked his old Mercury (the only vehicle he had left) in our driveway and proceeded to move into our spare bedroom where he stayed for about two months.

During the time that he lived with us, Harold drank every drop of liquor in the house, became engaged to a woman he somehow met in the interim, and talked to our creditor's committee, telling them we were incompetent and needed to be removed as debtors-in-possession.  When I heard what he had done, I hung him out the second story window by his heel, threatening to let go.

"I don't really care how you treat people that you don't know, but Anne and I are your friends.  You shouldn't treat us like marks."

My actions must have had an effect because Harold never again treated me, or Anne, like a mark.  He did talk the owner of an OKC mud company into starting an oil company and hiring him as president.  The long-time mud company owner died a pauper after Harold had sucked off every penny he had.

Anyway, I got to thinking about Harold after my story about the Carousel Lounge in Shreveport.  Harold, Anne and I had an adventure at the Carousel Lounge in New Orleans, at the Monteleone Hotel - an adventure instigated by Harold.  Never drink at a rotating bar, is a rule that I had lived by for years, only to violate it some twenty years later.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Having fallen into bankruptcy at the end of the last oil boom, Anne and I traveled to cities all over the United States, looking for a bank to lend us the money to bail us out of the situation.  We didn't find a bank.  Like many oil companies, they were also going out of business right and left.  There were so many houses foreclosed in Oklahoma City that the FDIC had to open an office here.  Soon, they had a thousand employees working in the city.

We weren't the only Oklahoma oil company in trouble.  Everyone was in trouble!  Our banking leads exhausted, we began looking for a "white knight" investor, someone that would inject some much needed capitol into the company.  Harold knew such a person in New Orleans so we headed south to make our pitch.

Harold got us booked at the Monteleone Hotel, a wonderful place on Royal, just a block from Bourbon Street.  He'd invited his new girlfriend as his latest marriage was already in the dumpster.  Harold wasn't good with relationships.  The next day after checking in, we took a taxi down Bourbon Street.

Mr. X lived in a million dollar shotgun house on the end of Bourbon Street.  A shotgun house, built in the 1700s, is so named because if you unloaded a shotgun at the front door, the load would exit the back door.  There isn't much to a shotgun house but because of their locations, they are worth millions of dollars - yes, even after Katrina.

Harold introduced us to Mr. X, a friendly man with dark Cajun hair and eyes and a long black moustache.  He had a man servant that I will call Hay-sus.  Hay-sus couldn't speak English but he knew how to mix drinks.  Mr. X started talking and we all began drinking, pretty much all day long.  Mr. X had apparently been ruined by a one-time banker friend (surprise, surprise!) and they were now bitter enemies.

We never really got a chance to state our case but Mr. X did take us back to the Monteleone for dinner.  He was allergic to seafood and didn't like steak so we had enchiladas at the restaurant's Mexican restaurant.  There was a troupe of singers and Mr. X paid them probably a thousand dollars, at a hundred dollars a pop, to sing various Mexican songs.

Harold's girlfriend left sometime during the night (he was hell on relationships!) so we met at the Carousel Bar the next day for drinks before flying back to OKC.  Hey, just like my freshman year in college, I got so drunk and disoriented that I could hardly walk out of the place.  Anne and I never found a “white knight” and the bankruptcy stood, our hopes and dreams struck down like so many tin soldiers.  We did, however, have an experience that others can only dream about.  It’s now but a memory and I'm passing it on.

http://www.ericwilder.com

They say that life goes on.  Yes it’s true.  Shortly after the passing of my wife, I headed north to Garfield County where I had a well drilling.  My heart was sad but it felt good to be away from the sterile hospital walls I had haunted for the past fourteen months.  I spotted the derrick ten miles before I actually reached it on the flat Oklahoma plain.

We’d had a drilling break earlier in the day and I had called a drill-stem test for the elusive 1^st Wilcox Sand zone that we had encountered.  They were pulling the pipe as I drove up on the location.  Bill met me as I drove up on location.

Bill was the crusty completion man for the company to whom I had sold the prospect – the best completion man in the business, I’d been told.  He didn’t seem so crusty when he greeted me.

“Steve told me your wife just passed away.”

“Last week,” I said.

Bill slapped me on the back.  “Hang in there, Pardner.  It’ll all get better.”

It was a glorious early spring day, a slight nip still in the air.  We stood in the doghouse, fifteen feet off the ground, watching as the roughnecks yanked stand after stand of drill pipe.  The diesel engine groaned every time it pulled the heavy steel pipe toward the crow’s nest.

“I was about your age when my first wife died,” Bill finally said.

“You had a wife that died?” I asked, suddenly interested.

“She had cancer, just like your wife.”

The sun was beginning to set and the roughnecks had most of the pipe out of the hole and still no show.  I was beginning to get discouraged but Bill said, “We’re going to get oil on this test.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

Bill pointed at the swarm of flies, by now almost covering the rig floor.  “They smell it,” he said.  “It’s coming.”

The next stand of pipe the roughnecks pulled proved him correct.  Black gold poured onto the rig floor when they broke the joint between the two stands.  We were four stands off bottom, every stand filled with oil.

“How long did it take for you to get over the death of your wife?” I asked as the last stand of pipe was pulled from the hole.

“Never,” he said, “But it gets easier with every passing year.  I’m remarried now. Oil wives have to be understanding and my wife is the best person in the world.  Someday soon you’ll find some one too.”

“But why us, Bill?”

“Unless they die in a car or plane crash, every couple, sooner or later, will have to face what we’ve already faced.  You might say we’ve got a leg up.”

We sat pipe on the well with high hopes.  The 1^st Wilcox Sand, it turned out, was depleted and we came up the hole to another zone that made a commercial, although marginal well.  I thought of this story today as oil topped $110 a barrel for the first time ever.

Ninety percent of all the wells in the United States are classified as stripper wells, capable of producing less than ten barrels of oil or ten MCFG per day.  Most of the majors left the country a decade or more ago.  What are left are mostly mom and pop oil companies drilling a few wells every year for the dregs of the keg.

Don’t hate the oil industry.  For every billionaire like Boone Pickens there are a thousand Bills out there, and two thousand roughnecks toiling from dawn till dusk, often seven days every week.  If it wasn’t for them, oil would already be $200 a barrel.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Oil Soars to New Record Price - AOL News.

Here is an interesting article just released by Bloomberg.

March 10 (Bloomberg) -- Natural gas in New York advanced, erasing an earlier decline, after crude oil rose to a record $107 a barrel.

Oil surged as investors sought higher returns available in commodities than in the equity markets as the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and Dow Jones Industrial averages declined. Oil has risen 81 percent in the past year and natural gas 41 percent, while the Dow has fallen 3.5 percent and the S&P 500 8.2 percent.

``It's one unified investment theme now, the state funds, the pension funds'' are buying commodities, said Tom Orr, director of research at Weeden & Co. in Greenwich, Connecticut. The price relationship between crude oil, gasoline and natural gas has tightened, he said.

Natural gas for April delivery rose 1.6 percent to $9.933 per million British thermal units at 1:21 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Were gas to close at this price, it would be the highest since Jan. 4, 2006, when it settled at $10.197.

Crude oil for April delivery climbed $2.30, or 2.2 percent, to $107.45 a barrel in New York. Oil earlier touched $107.85, the highest since trading began in 1983.

Many investors ``are trying to play the energy space as an asset class,'' said Orr.

More pension funds and other money managers plan to have in excess of 10 percent of their portfolios in commodities in the next three years, Barclays Plc said.

Thirty-four percent of about 260 investors surveyed at a conference in Barcelona last week said that more than 10 percent of their portfolios would soon consist of commodities, Kevin Norrish, director of commodity research, told reporters in London. That's up from 22 percent of those surveyed a year earlier and 19 percent in 2006, he said.

LNG

Higher demand for liquefied natural gas from countries such as China has reduced the number of cargoes coming to the U.S., putting increased pressure on U.S. inventories, said Orr.

Average imports ``could be below 2 billion cubic feet a day'' for 2008, he said. LNG is natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state so that it can be put on ships and transported to markets not connected by pipeline.

March cargoes are averaging 800 million cubic feet a day, less than one-third the daily average a year ago,Stacy Nieuwoudt, an analyst at Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities Inc. of Houston, said in a note today.

January and February shipments were about half those for the same months in 2007 as demand spurred gas prices in Europe and Asia, attracting cargoes to countries in those regions.

-- With reporting by Chanyaporn Chanjaroen and Saijel Kishan in London, and Reg Curran in Calgary. Editor: Theo Mullen.

http://www.ericwilder.com

I wrote a story called Chicken Fries that I published in my newest book Just East of Eden.  The story is largely true and recounts one summer when my then wife Anne and I, and our friend Ray, watched a drilling well in Grant County, Oklahoma from the interior of a rented former motor home of Country singer Wanda Jackson, a one-time girlfriend of Elvis Presley.

The story includes details of Satanism and cattle mutilations.  In the summer that Chicken Fries occurred, such stories dominated the headlines in newspapers throughout the country.  During this period, most Oklahoma newspapers and news stations considered a sheriff in Grant County the expert of choice on Satanism and he was always consulted when a mutilated cow found or newly formed crop circle was found.  Pundits were torn between pointing the finger of guilt at Satanists, or extra-terrestrials.  In my story, the Satanists were actually pagans, members of the Southern Death Cult.

It was an interesting time that seems behind us now.  Maybe, but in my novel in progress, Panther Stalking,  Buck McDivit encounters an all-female sect of the Southern Death Cult at a compound in Logan County, Oklahoma, and more than cattle mutilations and crop circles are involved.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Anne and I were living in our third rent house since our company's bankruptcy.  It was a great house with a swimming pool and gazebo, but it wasn't ours.  I had continued to make a semblance of a living as a geologist.  The running joke during the 80s was MacDonald's suposed motto: "All our geologists have master's degrees," referring to the fact that many skilled oil people took almost any job they could find following the 80s oil bust, cooking at MacDonald's included.

Anne and I weren't quite there yet.  The place we rented had a large backyard and a giant barbecue pit far larger than almost anyone could ever need.  The large metal pit provided a wonderful shelter that a pregnant mother cat had somehow found.  Days later, the mewing of kittens caught my attention.  When I crawled beneath the pit for a look-see, I discovered Whiskers and her eight kittens.

Anne and I retrieved the animals from beneath the barbecue pit and ensconsced them in our laundry room.  All the babies were missing fur and our vet told us they had mange.

"They probably won't survive," he told us.

Already reeling from the weight of too much defeat, Anne and I weren't ready to hear his prognosis.  He gave us a formula, told us how to mix it and how to dip the kittens into it.  They cried whenever we dipped them and Anne cried whenever the kittens cried.  Somehow, they all recovered.  Yes, every last one of them!

We named the mother cat Whiskers.  She was a beautiful black and white cat with a patch of white on her chin that prompted the name.  Her kittens were all beauties and we gave them all away except one, a black kitty we named Hamlet.  As economic times grew worse, we left our large rent house and moved to a much smaller place - still a rent house.  It was adjacent to a large apartment complex and we soon had inherited three abandoned cats.

Things were bad in the oil patch.  Oil was trading for fifteen dollars a barrel and no one was drilling.  You couldn't give a prospect away!  Things turned worse when we learned Anne had lung cancer.  I had somehow managed to sell a prospect and we had purchased health insurance.  Thank goodness, because having cancer in this country without health insurance is a surefire way to die without treatment.  Anne got her treatment but lung cancer is almost impossible to beat.

"Please don't let me die in a rent house," she begged.

Anne and I weren't getting rich but we had managed to staunch the flowing wound.  We had developed a relationship with a local bank and had managed to keep their confidence.  I knew with our severely damaged credit that we could never get a normal house loan but we had a friendly banker, a very religious man that realized all business decisions aren't based on the bottom line.  Going beyond the pall, he lent Anne and me the money to buy the house in which I still live.

We moved into our new house with the help of many close and valued friends.  Anne's health continued to worsen and I had little time for my kitties, or my dog Lucky.  Shortly after Anne died, Whiskers disappeared.  Somehow, I felt that she wasn't  dead and I began driving past our old house, thinking she may have somehow wandered back there.  I know that this seems unlikely, but two years after Anne's death, I got a call from a woman that said she had my cat.  Dubious that the impossible might be true, I went to the house nearly three miles away and found Whiskers.

"I can see she's your cat," the woman said.  "She practically jumped into your arms and I've tried for three days to try and touch her."

It was Whiskers.  She was alive, a fact that I had somehow never doubted.  I took her home and fed her, and she remained with me for another three years.

http://www.ericwilder.com

http://www.ericwilder.com

This article is very interesting.  It is from an interview today with U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Bloomberg Television.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&refer=energy&sid=ahxFIXRH6qpw

Jamie MacMurry’s race car was in front of a liquor store down the street from my office so I stopped for a couple of pictures.  Hey, NASCAR uses plenty of oil and gas!

http://www.ericwilder.com

Interesting in the explanation for the price increase of oil and gas.  It’s actually quite a bit more complicated, but this makes for a nice headline.

Bloomberg.com: Energy.

Fresh from the war, I started graduate school at the University of Arkansas.  Separated from polite society for almost two years, I was trying desperately to regain some of its social graces.  My new thesis advisor, Dr. K, reminded me as much every day.

Dr. K had an idea for a thesis project in the Ouachita Mountains.  Arkansas is one of the most geologically diverse areas on earth.  Almost every mineral occurs there naturally, and many other minerals are found no where else.  Dr. K, a brilliant man, was a graduate of Cornell University and to say that I was a bit intimidated by him would be an understatement.

I wasn't the only person returning from Vietnam.  There were half a dozen of us, including an ex-Green Beret.  Dr. K and I were walking down the hall one day when we came upon Mr. GB, his back to us and obviously in deep thought.  When Dr. K tapped him on the shoulder, he wheeled around, coming up with a vicious blow to the good Dr's groin and laying him out on the hallway floor.  When Dr. K regained his senses, and his breath, he dragged himself off the floor.

I understood GB's motivation.  It took me months to keep from hitting the ground whenever a car backfired near me.  Still, I fully expected Dr. K, the chairman of the department of geology, to lower the proverbial boom on the ex-green beret.  Instead, he began speaking in a soft, friendly tone.

"I realize where you just came from and how horrible it must have been, but you're back in the States now.  I'm going to let what you just did pass this time, but sometime in the future I'm going to tap you on the shoulder.  If you ever lay a hand on anyone ever again, for any reason, you will be dismissed from the Arkansas geology department and you won't be welcomed back.

I was with Dr. K the next time he came up on Mr. GB from behind and believe me, I wouldn't have done what he did.  He tapped Mr. GB's shoulder and stood there, waiting for the inevitable reaction.  As if in slow motion, Mr. GB bent forward, almost touching the floor, and then began his karate twirl.  This time he stopped abruptly before he ever made his turn, his deadly blow pulled before ever making contact.  When he saw Dr. K, he began to shake uncontrollably.

Dr. K nodded, smiled slightly and said, "Welcome back to the world."

In southwest Arkansas, just south of the Ouachita Overthrust, is a geologically complex area known only to a few lucky people.  Before I ever set foot on the terrain, I got a lesson in life from an amazingly complex person that understood the human heart as well as he knew the heart of the earth.

http://www.ericwilder.com