The future looks rosier for the natural gas industry.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=aOQq3vVlpKaI

They say that life goes on.  Yes, it is 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 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 heard.  He did not 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 they pulled the last stand of pipe from the hole.

“Never,” he said, “But it gets easier with every passing year.  I am 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 when oil topped first topped a hundred-ten dollars a barrel for the first time ever.

Ninety percent of all the wells in the United States produce 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.

Do not hate the oil industry.  For every billionaire like Boone Pickens there are a thousand, nay a million, Bills out there, and two thousand roughnecks toiling from dawn until dusk, often seven days every week.  If it were not for them, oil would already be two-hundred dollars a barrel.

Eric’sWeb