Alabama's First Gusher

With high hopes, Allen Moye, 39, a hard-scrabbling cotton planter and hog raiser, gave rights to Humble Oil & Refining Co. to drill a wildcat well on his 100-acre farm, just five miles above the Florida line, near Pollard, Ala. He knew the odds were long even though Humble, one of the biggest wildcat gamblers in the U.S., was doing the drilling. For 18 days, Moye, his wife and four children watched as the Humble bits sank a full mile below the cotton fields without striking anything. Then, under the glare of the night lights, at 5,945 ft., the drills came up smudged black with oil. Next morning, a gusher shot 100 ft. into the air, the first flowing well in Alabama's history.

At the news last week, oilmen from five states made a beeline for Pollard, looked at their reflections in the pool of oil (see cut), and frantically began bidding for leases. Overnight, leases shot up from $2.50 a year per acre to as high as $50. On the New York Stock Exchange, St. Regis Paper Co., which owns some nearby land, became the heaviest-traded stock, gained more than two points. Gulf and Standard of Indiana, which own leases near by, got ready to sink wells of their own. "The well blew its top," said Alabama's state geologist, Dr. Walter B. Jones, "and all the oil people blew their tops."

Christmas in January. The Moye well is already producing 300 bbls. a day of good-quality crude, and some oilmen think that it can yield 1,000 bbls. With his one-eighth royalty, Farmer Moye, who paid off his mortgage only last September, could count on an income of perhaps $25,000 to $30,000 a year.

If it seemed like a belated Christmas to Moye, it was all in the day's work for Humble's 58-year-old, lawyer-trained President Hines Holt Baker of Houston. In the blue-chip game of oil, gambling on wildcats is part of his business. Wildcatting has helped make Humble the No. 1 U.S. producer of crude oil, and more than doubled its output in a decade (from 49 million bbls. in 1940 to 103 million in 1950). It also helped Humble boost its net profit by 66% in 1951's first half, the latest report it has issued.

Humble is 72.4% owned by Standard Oil Co. (NJ.),and is its biggest U.S. subsidiary, but Baker runs it, from the Humble Building in Houston, pretty much like a sovereignty, looks on the parent company much as Texas looks on the rest of the U.S.

The Cost of Wildcats. In the nearly four years that Baker has been president, Humble has spent an estimated $215 million on speculative digging, plans to spend another $70 million this year, drill some 800 wells. Humble went into Alabama after Dallas' Hunt Oil Co. struck the first oil there in 1944--the Gilbertown field, 80 miles north of Mobile, which now has 69 producing wells. Humble opened the second field, the Carlton, some 55 miles northeast of Mobile in 1949, now has nine producers there. In all these, the oil must be pumped up, usually the sign of a small field. But when Humble's Allen Moye No. 1 Well came in under its own pressure, oilmen quickly changed their minds, now think that Alabama may become a big producer.

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