A Poor Man's Field

OIL & GAS

In the corn-bread-and-collards country around Greensburg, Ky., farmers have known they were sitting on top of oil ever since the first oil was found in a saltwater well in 1828. But geologists and oilmen insisted it could not be produced commercially; too much water was mixed with the oil. Almost the only man who doubted the experts was Milton G. Turner, 63, a local farmer, trader and self-taught oil expert. He thought they were dead wrong. Last week he had the best evidence to prove it. A snaking strip of Green County land running 15 miles east to west and one or two miles wide was the hottest local oil play in the U.S.

There are 500 producing wells--150 of them Turner's--producing 19,000 bbl. of oil a day. Green County oil leases, sold last spring for $1 a farm plus one-eighth of the oil, now are bringing $2,500 to $3,000 an acre, plus a quarter of the oil for the farmer.

What makes the Green County strike rare in U.S. oil history is that it is, says Turner, "a poor man's field." Oil is so close to the surface that ordinary water-well drilling equipment will reach it, and $6,000 covers all the costs of bringing in a well, compared to $100,000 and up in many U.S. fields.

Crazy about Oil. Turner, long indulgently regarded by friends as daft about oil, got his first encouragement in 1957. He persuaded Starr Gas Co. of Midland, Texas to come in and drill by procuring leases for it on 3,000 acres. The first well struck oil, but it was mixed with so much salt water that Starr Co. despaired of getting the oil out of the petroleum-bearing strata. Disgusted, Starr sold the well, equipment and 80 acres of surrounding lease to Turner for $2,500. Undiscouraged, Turner decided to try his own method. He thought an extremely powerful pump might draw down the water level so fast that the oil locked up in the rock would flow into the bore, where it could be pumped up. Using a tractor for power, Turner soon had the well producing as much oil in a day as the Starr Co. pump had produced in a month.

By offering to give away leases, Turner stimulated others to drill. Last winter, off in the backwoods, two more wells came in. In April the Frank Beams farm on the main Louisville road, which Turner had leased and subleased, came in flowing thick black oil--and the boom was on. Farmer Ellis Hood, 45, who barely scratched out $2,400 a year from his 85 hilly acres, now rakes in $325 a day; ex-Marine Early Vaughn Dulworth, 36, who paid $200 for a part interest in the Beam lease, now gets back $2,000 a month (his mother's farm in the main oil area has an estimated $1,300,000 of untapped oil); a hamburger-stand operator who leased the stand for $15 a month settled back to collect $1,500 a month in royalties on the parking lot.

New Pipeline. Turner himself is making out all right. With two brothers, a sister, a neighbor and the neighbor's sister, he organized the M.G. Turner Co., which, besides nearly a third of the producing wells, owns or has an interest in 20,000 acres of choice leaseholds. Neighbors estimate that the partnership is taking in $1,200,000 a year. The first well the Texans abandoned has already produced 7,000 bbL. worth $18,200. Says Turner with a smile, "We're just getting started."

Last week few knew how long the bonanza would last--or how far out and down the oilfield goes. Wildcatters were putting down wells over an area of hundreds of square miles north and south of the strike, seeking to establish the field's boundaries. In one solid gesture of confidence in the future, the Ashland Oil & Refining Co., purchaser of the bulk of the field's output, already has invested $200,000 in gathering lines, last week took bids on a $2,000,000 pipeline to pump oil directly to its refinery in Louisville, 70 miles away.

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