This Sure Doesn't Look Like Southfork, JR.

At the time that I decided to get out of the Army, my oldest kids were 4 and 1 years young. I was looking at my next assignment in Germany and I thought that it was time to do something different. So I decided to become an oil baron. Just like that, I decided to pull a Jed Clampett and find some of that bubbling crude.

I started to work as a Field Engineer for Schlumberger in November 1980. It was kind of a strange time in our history. A California Governor had just beaten the incumbent President, the railroads were deregulated and Ol' Simmons started looking for oil. I loaded up the family and moved to Corpus Christi to begin my pursuit of riches. At the time I left the service, I was a Captain in the Army and made about $17,000 per year and my first year with Schlumberger, I more than tripled that. Seemed like a no-brainer, so I signed on the dotted line.

Then it all began and it was a whirlwind of training and work. I was sent to Shreveport-Bossier City to study the intricacies of wireline logging. Logging is an interesting concept that was started back in 1927 by Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger in France. The basic principle that the Schlumberger brothers had hit on consisted of lowering a tool into a well that could take measurements of resistivity from the formation. Knowing that water would conduct electricity better than oil, they presumed that higher resistivity indicated that the formation probably was bearing hydrocarbons rather than water. The technology had advanced a great deal from that initial logging venture to the equipment I began working with in 1980. At this time we were able to not only measure resistivity, but we could assess the porosity and permeability of the rock and take solid and fluid samples at various depths along the wellbore.

After my training, I began logging wells all over southeast Texas. My crew consisted of two operators who drove the logging truck, set-up the tools and ran the winch that lowered the tools into the well. I drove to the well site in my blue Schlumberger car (which became my hotel/home for the next two years) and spent most of the time sitting in the airconditioned truck at the computer. I enjoyed getting out and helping put the tool strings together and assisting the operators whenever I could. Oil companies would pay Schlumberger quite a handsome sum for the information that we provided and they were also paying the drilling company to stand by all of the time that we were on site, so we were constantly under pressure to get the job done right and as soon as possible. The information from the logs told the oil companies whether the well was worth producing, as well as where (what depth) and how they should do it.

It was an interesting time for me to be doing this kind of work and under normal circumstances; I think I would have enjoyed it. But these times were not normal at all because the oil companies were drilling wells at an extremely rapid pace that was far beyond what the wireline companies could keep up with at the time. We would pull up on a well site to log a well, which took anywhere from a couple of days to a week, and before we were set-up the dispatcher would be calling requesting a status because of other jobs that were waiting. For weeks, my operators and I would travel from well to well, logging and catching some sleep on site as the time would permit.

We logged mainly for the major oil producers, like Exxon and Texaco, but we also did jobs for small independents and even smaller joint efforts that were truly wildcat experiences. After about a year of logging, I got the opportunity to log on one of these wildcat adventures that was being funded by some doctors and lawyers down around Uvalde. The set-up was poor from the start because they were scrimping on money all the way. The site had a too narrow access road that the logging truck could barely traverse and the pad was so small that we couldn't turn around, so my operators had to back the truck in for over a half a mile. We did manage to get set-up without getting off the caliche and we negotiated the financial terms of the logs on site via radio through our dispatcher to our district headquarters. The drilling company was pure Hispanic and if it had not been for my tutelage under Senor Liston, I'm not sure how we could have coordinated our set-up. The doctors and lawyers had pulled their big Lincoln on site and had opened the bar in the trunk and had begun imbibing prior to us getting the first tool in the hole. My instructions were to notify them when our log came up through their anticipated pay zone, which, I believe was around 5500 feet. Those folks were having a hey-old time out in the dark, just drinking and carrying on while we were inside the truck watching their log. Around 5600 feet, I kicked open the door and yelled at the now inebriated professionals and told them that we were approaching their pay zone. In they came, stumbling drunk with drinks in hand wanting to see if they had struck it rich. The logging screen was rather small and could only be seen well with the lights off, so they milled around bumping into each other and jostling my chair, all trying to get a view of the mother lode on the screen. Just about the time that we came upon a change in the resistivity around 5500 feet, one of the sure handed doctors spilled his drink over me, my keyboard and computer. The logging screen went blank, the tool kept coming up and we had no communications with it. The party kind of dwindled down after that.

We managed to complete this logging effort for the docs and lawyers and they had a small pay zone that probably didn't even pay for their expenses. Me and the boys packed up the truck and went to another job. I learned a lot while logging and made some pretty good money at the same time, but I'd never do that again. After a couple of years, I decided it was time to move on to the production side of the oil business and I'll tell you something about that in the next edition.