We were entering Port Arthur, passing under the soaring eyesore of the bridge that connected Pleasure Island with West Port Arthur. The Valero refinery crawled by on the left, superb in the mist. The Sabine Pilots should charge for tours of the waterfront. Throw in a bottle of champagne and some strawberries, and nobody would ever have to ride in a hot-air balloon again.
On the right, I spotted the concrete slab where Nelson and I had gone fishing. He had called me earlier in the week, leaving a joyously unintelligible message, inviting me over for dinner the night before my ride with the Sabine Pilots. He still had my oil spill fish in his freezer. We cooked them in foil packets on a grill in his front yard, next to his dump truck. The fish that needs no oil, steaming and succulent, with rice and tortillas on the side.
We had reached downtown Port Arthur.
“Isn’t this the place where the accident happened in January?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” Tweedel said. “It was a ship just like this.” And there was silence on the bridge.
Tweedel and Duane were deeply skilled men, dedicated to their craft and fully aware of its importance. But any system that depends on a high level of human skill is, by its nature, vulnerable to human error. Many months later, when the government finally announced the results of its investigation into the Port Arthur oil spill, it would point the finger largely at the Sabine Pilots. The lead pilot on board the Eagle Otome, in particular, had started his turn under the bridge too late, and then failed to correct for the sheering motions that resulted, pushing the tanker into a grand swerve that ended in its collision at the wharf. The government report would acknowledge other contributing factors, but it would place the most specific blame at the feet of the pilots. In the end, it came down to bad driving.
I went outside on the port deck, a steel platform that jutted out from the wheelhouse, high over the water. The rain had stopped, and the breeze was warm under the clouds, and faintly rank. Earlier, the air had been full of birds, a squad of pelicans coasting overhead, just out of reach, and black-headed Bonaparte’s gulls cavorting behind the ship. They were attracted to the wake of the vessel, Duane said, to the tidbits churned up from the bottom of the channel as we passed.
And that is how we rolled along. A half-million barrels of oil coasting inland at seven knots, attended by a host of dancing birds. Enough petroleum to sustain the needs of the nation for a whole forty minutes.
A sign once pointed tourists to a viewpoint from which they could peer into Spindletop and see, distantly, the actual site of the Lucas Gusher. But a hurricane blew the sign down, and it has not been replaced. To people driving past, Spindletop is a void space, a low mile of trees by the highway that goes unremarked, even in the area whose prosperity it once sparked.
But however invisible, the wedge of land between Sulphur Drive and West Port Arthur Road holds a secret. And the secret is this: the oil rush on Spindletop is not over. Not quite.
Steven Radley is the last man standing. More than a hundred years and 150 million barrels of oil after Patillo Higgins’s hunch first came good—and a half century after the major producers left this land for dead—he is doing his damndest to squeeze every last cup of petroleum out of its stubborn soil.
We met up by a set of large, squat oil tanks that hunkered in the predawn darkness. Radley was a boyish man of fifty, his face creased by decades of work in the oil fields of Southeast Texas. In his truck, we bumped down the dirt tracks that counted as roads on Spindletop, and I asked him about the new well. Was there any chance it would be a gusher?
“I hope not!” he said, smiling. “That’d be fun for about ten minutes. And then we’d have to clean it up.”
He was planning to drill to a depth of 1,250 feet, just short of the layer of rock that crowns the salt dome that is Spindletop’s dominant geological feature. It was along the edges of this huge underground tower of salt that oil had collected over the ages. The new well would be similar in depth to the famous Lucas No. 1, but unlike its precursor, Radley’s well was not about to make oil cheaper than water, or to outproduce the rest of the country. When I asked him what the new well would be, if not a gusher, he grimaced. “Probably not a very good one, honestly.”
Beyond the trees there was a cold, artificial glow. We had reached the drilling area, tucked between a woody thicket and a curve in the service road.
For most wells, it is no longer necessary to build a stationary, towering drilling derrick, like you see in old pictures. Instead, Radley was using a mobile rig, mounted on the back of a sky-blue vehicle the size of a fire truck. It had been parked on a level pad laid down on the loose, powdery soil, and then its derrick had been folded upright. A narrow steel scaffold, maybe seventy-five feet tall, the derrick had red and white struts that were fitted with the glare of a dozen fluorescent bulbs.
Radley parked next to the trees. A hopeful thought rattled into my fore-brain. I pointed at the rig.
“You know, I’d be happy to lend a hand.”
He laughed.
“No, really,” I said. “Just hold a wrench, or whatever.”
He laughed again, as though I’d told him some great double-punch line joke about a jerk who wants to help out on a drilling rig—when instead, in a stroke of brilliance, I’d just invented the oil field dude ranch.
We got out of the car. Three roughnecks were clambering around on the derrick. Radley pointed out the driller, the derrick hand, the floor hand. “Just call them roughnecks,” he said. “They all do everything.” The division of labor broke down on operations this small.
We walked over to the base of the derrick. In front of it, three dozen lengths of drilling pipe, each thirty-two feet long, were laid out. At the base of the rig, lying disconnected on its side, was the rotary drill bit: a trio of knuckled wheels that formed a heavy fist of red-painted metal. Its surface had the hefty gleam of a toolbox.
“That’s brand-new,” Radley said, nodding with approval. “You can use one like that for four or five wells.” After that, it might be possible to rebuild the bit. More likely it would become a paperweight.
Drilling an oil well is an art, one that was developed, in part, right here on Spindletop. The bit is fixed to heavy lengths of drill pipe. The pipe is then turned—driven in this case by a large, hanging tool called a power swivel. The rotating pipe rolls the wheels of the drill bit against the sand and rock below, grinding and shattering downward. At the same time, a slurry of drilling mud is forced down through the pipe, emerging at the bottom of the well from an opening in the bit. As it circulates back to the surface, the mud carries away the cuttings, the loose fragments of rock or sand that the bit has ground through.
“Drilling mud was invented right here!” Radley said, as we watched the roughnecks prepare the rig. “They actually had a bunch of cows tramping around in a pen to produce it.” It was Anthony Lucas who had pioneered the use of drilling mud, and it was a key innovation. Rotary drilling had been around for a while by the turn of the twentieth century, but the use of drilling mud prevented the narrow sides of a well from falling in against the shaft of the drilling pipe, causing it to seize up. This was especially critical in the young geology of coastal Texas, which confronted drillers with layer after layer of clay and sand. Drilling mud has been a staple of oil exploration ever since, even on the most sophisticated offshore rigs.
Radley’s roughnecks threw themselves into their preparations like lively, oil-stained pirates. The bit was fitted to the heavy first stage of pipe, and the driller mounted the control station. The power swivel swiveled. Mud circulated. A mercenary focus concentrated the air; I stared at the rig like a midshipman watching the sails for wind. The sun had come up. Then, at the pull of a lever, the rig’s engine revved, the shaft spun, and the bit dropped through a hole in the drilling floor into the ground below. Returning mud flowed up out of the well and along a small trench to a large pit out back, where it would be filtered and cycled back into the pipe. We were drilling for oil.
Radley’s gear was recent technology: powerful, mobile, and automated. Tasks that even a few decades ago required multiple workers—like adding a new section of drilling pipe—could now be accomplished by two people with a power swivel and a pair of hydraulic tongs. But the basic elements of rotary drilling—derrick, pipe, bit, mud—hadn’t changed. Anthony Lucas would have known with a single look what Steven Radley was doing, and why. The difference is that, while Lucas was convinced he could find large reservoirs of oil, Radley wasn’t looking for anything but dregs.
Most oilmen focus on discovering and extracting deposits that haven’t yet been found or tapped into. From the speculators buying up land around Beaumont in 1901 to multinational corporations using sophisticated seismic imaging off the coast of Brazil, the purpose of the game is to secure a prize that can justify the vast up-front investment.
Eventually, though, the returns begin to diminish, and the expense of reconfiguring and maintaining existing wells—not to mention sinking new ones—is no longer justified by the declining revenue coming out of the field. It’s at that point that an oil company abandons a place. Not when the oil is completely gone, but when there’s too little of it to be worth the effort.
Such a field becomes known as a stripper field, and will be left for smaller companies with less overhead or less ambitious profit targets. Such companies depend on keeping their costs down and on using whatever technology or ingenuity they can to squeeze out of the ground what Big Oil left behind.
“I don’t have a lot of overhead,” Radley told me. “We do things the least expensive way possible. I’ve got it down to where I don’t think anyone can drill cheaper than we do.”
He started drawing lines in the sand, counting off the strikes against big oil companies. They had CEOs, and executives, and lawyers on staff, and on and on. In contrast, Radley’s corporate structure was uncomplicated: He owned 40 percent of the company, and his father owned the rest. And unlike the chief executives and board members of, say, ExxonMobil, Radley and his dad were their own middle management and technical staff, working their own leases every day. Radley’s wife ran the office, and his son worked for the company as well. (The roughnecks were freelancers.)
Radley’s other trick was to avoid rental and contractor fees by owning his own oil rig. Usually, a small operation like this would contract the drilling to someone else. But not Radley.
“That’s mine!” he said, pointing at the drilling rig. “That bulldozer, that’s mine! Everything out here is mine! That’s why I can make it on a five-barrel well. And we do our own geology.”
This meant they saved money by forgoing sophisticated geophysical analysis, like seismic reflection or gravity surveys. Instead, they used a simpler method. Radley demonstrated it for me by scratching his head and then pointing at a spot on the ground.
“This looks good!” he said.
By eleven in the morning, we were 250 feet deep and settling into the rhythm of the work. The rig’s engine would rev up, and the section of drilling pipe would descend into the ground, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, depending on the character of sand or rock the bit was working through. Once the section of pipe had fully descended, it was time to detach the power swivel, pull another piece of heavy pipe off the rack, hoist it upright, and thread it into the string. One of the roughnecks would reattach the power swivel to the top of it all, and then drilling would begin again.
It wasn’t easy work. The roughnecks were in constant motion, guiding the new lengths of pipe into place, making sure they sat correctly, spraying excess mud off the drilling platform with a hose, readying the next stage of pipe. Radley timed the intervals between stages of drilling, to see how efficient his workers were in the changeover. “About three minutes,” he said. “Pretty good.”
This was Radley in the role of both “pusher” and “company man,” the two people whose job on a well is to make sure that it gets drilled without wasting time or money. And if Radley was a bit casual as a pusher, that was only because he knew and trusted his crew. The most important thing, in his view, was that he manage the well in person.
“On those big rigs,” he said, “the pusher’s in a trailer, he’s got screens with pressure, drill speed, temperature, how many feet per minute, per hour, or whatever. And he just sits there and watches the screens.”
He shook his head. “To me, that’s not drilling. That’s bullshit.”
Section after section of the drill string descended into the ground, and we got bored. Radley and I hopped into his truck and took a spin around the lease. He had owned oil wells in one form or another since he was fifteen years old, when his father had encouraged him to invest in one. His father had been working his own small-time wells on the weekends and after hours from his job as an electrical contractor. Radley had started going along to help when he was still a little boy. It was all part of the world of Little Oil, in which it was completely reasonable for a teenager to buy his own share in a well, and where a mom-and-pop company could end up with the mineral rights to the oil field that sparked the petroleum revolution.
The problem with sinking wells is that it’s hard to tell which will produce and which won’t. We passed a nearby well that wasn’t producing anything; eighty feet farther was one that yielded four or five barrels of oil a day—and fifty of water. The small, lazy rocking horse of the pump dipped up and down as we drove by. Radley told me that just on the other side there was a well that produced even less oil, but more water. The area was all fractured, he explained. The ground was still shifting. It was impossible to know exactly where the oil was, in what direction it wanted to seep, and where the blockages were. Even Lucas No. 1 would have come up dry if it had been drilled fifty feet away.
“Oh, I would love to go down one of them holes,” Radley said. “We can’t know what’s down there.” It was only through deduction that he could become anything less than blind, piecing together an idea of what was going on at the business end of his drilling pipe, hundreds or thousands of feet underground.
We passed another well, and another. Radley estimated that he had thirty-five on the two leases he operated on Spindletop. Added to what he produced from a few other leases he owned, his company pumped about a hundred barrels of oil a day. I couldn’t decide whether that sounded like a lot. Was he making much money?
“I don’t even watch the price of oil anymore. I haven’t looked in three weeks,” he said. But of course he couldn’t ignore it completely. “At forty dollars a barrel, it’d be eating on me. When it was a hundred, hell yeah, I was happy. It’s a living. I ain’t gonna get rich.” He chuckled. “But I’m gonna eat real good.”
We headed back to the drill site, passing a wide pond. “You can fish in that water,” he said. “There’s bass. But they’re wormy.”
For a long time, Radley had had the area almost completely to himself. “It used to be we were the only ones out here,” he said. “It was literally just me, my dad, and my son.” But life on Spindletop had changed in recent years. There was a new wave of activity, and now perhaps a hundred people were working there on any given day. The natural gas business had landed.
But it wasn’t here to extract the stuff.
In a weird twist, the real action on Spindletop was no longer in taking fossil fuel out of the ground but in putting it back. For a range of economic and logistical reasons, natural gas companies need to store their product in large quantities, and creating caverns in underground salt formations is one of the best ways to do it. The huge salt dome underneath Spindletop, along the flank of which so much oil once collected, was now being hollowed out with caverns, each several hundred feet in diameter, thousands of feet tall, and more than half a mile underground. Gas storage companies planned to use them as impermeable storage tanks, each of which could hold billions of cubic feet of natural gas.
So the hill was a giant layer cake, divided for different purposes according to depth. The storage companies took the bottom layer, from about 6,000 to 2,500 feet b
elowground. From 1,500 on up was Radley’s territory, the specific depth for which he held the lease for extracting oil. Then, on top of it all, there was one last, tenuous layer.
“You see those orange fences over there?” Radley said when we were back at the drilling site. “Those are archaeologist playpens.”
The top several inches of soil on Spindletop were also being prospected—for historical evidence. A university archaeologist had fenced off the areas he thought most promising for his investigation of the early oil industry.
“It’s kinda neat being part of history,” Radley admitted. “The world changed right here.” But he took a dim view of the archaeologist, who Radley said hadn’t been coming to the site nearly often enough to get his work done—and get out. Meanwhile, Radley was supposed to stay out of the areas enclosed by the orange fences.
“I’ve got to get in there and drill a well,” he said, plainly annoyed. “I’m trying to be patient.” It was a testy relationship. Radley had already intruded once into a fenced-off area to do some maintenance on an electrical line. The archaeologist had complained, upset that the area had been disturbed.
Radley shook his head, lips pursed. “I said to him, ‘I been in there with a dozer ten years ago. It’s already been disturbed.’”
In the early afternoon, drilling on the new well broke down. The power swivel was leaking mud, I think, and needed to be pulled apart. Radley’s father, a cheerful man in his mid-seventies who looked likely to show up to work for at least another twenty years, inspected the power swivel, which now lay on the drilling deck, ready for him to operate. “This business would be okay,” he muttered, “if it wasn’t for breakdowns.”
I walked over to one of the orange fences set up by the archaeologist. KEEP OUT! a sign read. AVOID ALL CONTACT AND ENTRY TO THIS AREA. I peered over it, into the history of Spindletop. Tall grass grew out of the gravel.
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