The Giddings Oil Boom

In 1960 a well called the No. 1 City of Giddings came in flowing just under a hundred barrels a day, and the operator killed it with drilling mud to install production equipment. It never recovered, and it taught the trade a proverb: never kill an Austin Chalk well, because it will not come back. The oil was pale, almost honey coloured, and easier to refine than the black crude nearby. In 1972 C. W. Alcorn junior, a geologist working independently out of Victoria, bought that well and another for about twenty seven thousand dollars, roughly the salvage value of the iron standing on them. On the seventh of October 1973, the day after the Yom Kippur War began, a crew pumped ten thousand gallons of hydrochloric acid down it. Alcorn found the flow lines banging and the well making over three hundred barrels a day. Told it should be killed again to fit equipment, he said they would have to kill him first. The acid was not the breakthrough, and the difference matters, because most retellings call it a frac. The play stalled four more years until June 1977, when Ray Holifield gambled eighty thousand dollars on fracturing the Max Fariss No. 1, about a quarter the cost of a well. It came in at seven hundred and seventeen barrels a day, and the field became repeatable. Then it arrived. Late in 1979 there were two hundred and fifty wells and fifty rigs; by the autumn of 1980, seven hundred producing wells and eighty rigs along sixty miles of field in five counties. Giddings had been a town of about twenty five hundred in one of the ten poorest counties in Texas. Bank deposits grew by a million dollars a month, and seventy five hundred newcomers quadrupled it in a couple of years.