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Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
November 2008

Vol. 13, No. 46 Week of November 16, 2008

40 Years at Prudhoe Bay: Prudhoe Bay discovery: A retrospective

Richfield and then ARCO district manager takes a playful look back at the way it really happened and what might have been

Harry Jamison

Editor’s Note: These remarks are excerpted from a paper written for the Alaska Geological Society Technical Conference, April 19, 2008

First of all, let an old man of 83 years tell, for the first time, the unvarnished truth. I found it! I alone had the genius and persistence that led to success!

 The problem is that it didn’t happen like that. It was a team effort from the beginning.

It was my privilege to lead the exploration group within Richfield (Oil Co.) that did the geological field work, the recon and detailed seismic and the overall stratigraphic and structural analyses that convinced us we had viable play. Fellows like Ben Ryan, Charlie Selman, Armand Spielman, Leo Fay, Gar Pessel, Pete Clara, Rudy Berlin, Milt Norton, and yes, Gil Mull, all played vital roles.

Then there were fellows from Humble’s (Los Angeles) office, who we convinced in 1964 to buy into a very risky program. J.R. Jackson, Dean Morgridge and Ken Fuller were the first believers.

After the merger with Atlantic Refining in 1966, I once again was privileged to lead the combined company office in Anchorage as district manager. This time we were drilling the Susie Unit No.1 with a Loffland Bros. rig that we flew to the North Slope in Hercules cargo planes on lease from the Air Force. The (Susie) well was dry. So we took the rig some 60 miles north over the tundra to PB in early 1967 and spudded the Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 well before breakup, only to shut down in early May.

We had great construction foremen, expediters, drillers and tool-pushers under the overall supervision of my drilling and production superintendent Lee Wilson. Names like Benny Laudermilk, Joe Dunn, Wray Walker, Ernie Arp, Bill Congdon, Joe Mann, John Ruosi and Jim Keasler come to mind as well as our chief pilot, Marv Meyer, who ran our aircraft operation and Roland Champion, district landman.

The well was drilled, cored, tested and evaluated in an absolutely first-class fashion. These geologists and engineers who designed and carried out the program gave us the foundation for expansion on which to build the future development of the field.

John Sweet was my exploration manager and Don Jessup, Bill Pentilla, Marv Mangus, Woody Kingsbury and Jerry Rochon are a few key names.

Why do I get so specific as to name these Alaskans? To emphasize that it was a team effort and to give some degree of recognition to those who might not be remembered. Our ranks grow thinner, year by year.

Reality intrudes on rosy recollection

Man, was it exciting to drill into the Sadlerochit and the main Lisburne objective and have the great shows, cores and tests immediately and know you’ve hit the big time jackpot!

What a rush! To have your company executives, the politicians and the press hailing you as the new heroes of prosperity for the company, Alaska and the nation. What an ego trip!

The problem is: It didn’t happen like that.

In reality, it was a very slow, gradual awakening. We had shows all the way down the well. We had good, solid formation tests in the Sadlerochit and the Lisburne. We had test rates that were spectacular anywhere else. But were they good enough to make us believe we had a billon-barrel oil field? Not really.

We had a thick gas column on top of a relatively thin oil sand in the Sadlerochit.

Everyone knew what gas was worth in Alaska, especially on the North Slope.

Yes, there was excitement and enthusiasm within ARCO and certainly in the news media. But the Eureka moment did not arrive until we had drilled the confirmation well, Sag River State No.1. That was in July 1968, about a month after the completion of the Prudhoe Bay well. The first drill test in Prudhoe Bay No. 1 was in December 1967 and the confirmation well was drilled in July 1968.

That was really a gradual process, especially when you spend your time fending off constant inquiries about what you found and you really don’t know the answer.

Discovery reflects hard work

My feelings then were two-fold.

First, I was very proud of my team and the accuracy of that interpretation that led us to the discovery, followed by a successful step-out seven miles from the discovery. None of us had ever heard of such a thing. It took a lot of science, engineering and management guts.

Secondly, I was ecstatic that we could at last be credited with real success, a commercial discovery on the North Slope of a world-class oil field. A lot of people then and later, for whatever reason, attributed the discovery to luck.

Of course, I knew we’d been lucky but that our luck was based on 10 years of exploration, land acquisition efforts, logistical operational know-how and management level support all the way to the top at both ARCO and Humble.

We gave ourselves the opportunity for serendipity through hard, intelligent, persevering work and guts and judgment and it paid off.

Discoverers bask in glory of find. Not!

After all that science and engineering and good luck, what resulted for us was a leisurely round of congratulatory banquets and awards ceremonies, big promotions and public adulation. It was fulfilling and satisfying to be part of it.

The problem is: It didn’t happen like that.

What really happened was CHAOS.

It was like being caught completely unawares in a monstrous avalanche. We were deluged with orders, directives, requests, demands, obligations and bureaucratic nonsense.

First, we had to meet the immediate demand for action on the Slope, extension wells, air strip construction and controls, camp expansion, construction equipment, additional aircraft, fuel supplies, seismic crews, drilling rigs, security measures and a hundred other things. And we had to begin the series of findings for long-term development and production and pipeline segments.

What about housing several hundred, then several thousand workers? What about flying them in and out? What about finding them in the first place? You get the idea, hundreds of operational questions and problems were facing us every day.

Then we had the equally immediate need to vastly expand our staff in Anchorage in all disciplines. My bosses decided to provide me with managerial level help. So we added legal, business operations and employee relations departments and managers during the next few months. But no local help was forthcoming with government and public relations. We were left to our own devices and that was largely my bailiwick.

And we had visitors, did we ever have visitors!

I know personally that anyone in ARCO at all, who had an excuse, had an urgent need to come to Alaska. Folks also needed to cross the Arctic Circle, to be in a photo at the discovery well or at least, the Sag River site, and have a personal visit with the district manager, me.

We had folks from Humble, including auditors, who wanted to know why I rented Cats from Tennessee Miller’s Frontier Rock and Sand, rather than using company equipment (which we didn’t have).

We had the board of directors from Union Oil, including Chairman Fred Hartley, who during the oil spill in Santa Barbara, was rumored to have said, “What’s a few damn birds?”

And we had a delegation of about 50 from the United Nations in New York, accompanied by the president of ARCO, Thornton F. Bradshaw.

And we had enumerable members of the media, including Time, Oil & Gas Journal, Bakersfield Californian, Life, Oil World, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest and many, many others.

Our first visitor, however, was Alaska Gov. Walter J. Hickel, who was accompanied by Phil Holdsworth and Roscoe Bell, and we had a group of Humble managers along. During the UN visit, one of the diplomats was a small, slender East Indian lady dressed in a bright orange sari. At the time, we were beginning construction of the base camp, which required drilling a large number of 18-inch-wide eight- and 10-foot-deep holes in the permafrost to set pilings and foundations for the camp modules.

The Indian lady was very active and curious, and I remember being petrified that she would wander off and fall into one of the piling holes and disappear.

Another incident occurred, when, contrary to all flight and ground control rules, John J. King [the independent oil man who bought the rifle (Lee Harvey) Oswald used to kill Kennedy) landed on our airstrip at Sag River State. He debarked from the plane and was met by Bill Congdon, who was our rough and ready, surly and imposing tool-pusher.

King asked how far up the rig he and his party could go.

Bill growled, “You’re there right now.”

Congdon also told King he was on a private air strip without permission. John climbed back aboard and left with no further discussion.

Discovery still satisfying

Besides all the furor and frustration, there was a lot of satisfaction, too. After all, we’d found what was acknowledged as the largest oil field in North America and had done it in an efficient and professional manner.

Thirteen billion barrels of recoverable oil doesn’t go unnoticed.

My impression at the time: It was a damn good job of exploration in a remote, forbidding, harsh part of Alaska. It was an adventure and a lot of fun. The folks I had the privilege to work with were and are my personal heroes.

To borrow a familiar, partial quote from Dickens: “It was the best of times ...”






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