Alaska wildcatter Jim White dies: fierce property rights defender

Steve Sutherlin

Petroleum News

James (Jim) Wynn White, independent oilman and Alaskan wildcatter, died Jan. 22 in Houston, Texas, at the age of 90. White was owner of Alaskan Crude Corp.

White moved his family to Kenai, Alaska, in 1968, working first for Unocal at its new fertilizer plant in Nikiski, before setting out into various business ventures in the Kenai area.

In the mid-1970s, White opened Copper Valley Machine Works, a machine shop in Glennallen, to serve the construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, according to his son and fellow oilman, James A. White.

With no houses available in the boomtown, White and his family set up residence at the Caribou Hotel, which happened to be hosting a geophysical crew doing seismic work in the Copper River basin. White took an interest in the work and learned of various prospective structures across the basin.

White chose a spot, filed for a federal lease, and spudded the Alicia No. 1 well in 1976, using a small water well rig.

He vowed to drill until he either hit gas or ran out of money, reaching a depth of 1,600 feet before plugging and abandoning the well in 1982.

White was a fierce proponent and defender of private property rights, and it was in relation to the Alicia No. 1 well that White filed the first of his many lawsuits which have contributed richly to oil and gas case law in Alaska.

The initial lease term was for a period of two years, and when White requested an extension it was denied.

White reasoned that he had paid for a two-year lease, but the Feds restricted him to winter drilling only, so in effect, he had enjoyed only two six-month drilling periods, and as such he was entitled to two more of the same.

He lost the case in federal court, but that decision was reversed on appeal and a two-year extension was granted.

The family returned to Kenai when pipeline work wound down, and White worked on various jobs in Kenai and in Prudhoe Bay.

In 1985, White re-entered a long-time abandoned gas well near the town of Ninilchik on the southern Kenai Peninsula, his son James said. The well and field, known as the Susan Dionne, became a major gas producer on the Kenai Peninsula. It is still producing today.

“That was kind of his thing, going in and reentering wells that had been plugged and abandoned by the majors,” his son said. “They were looking for oil, and weren’t interested in gas or little puddles, as they called them.”

In 1986 White re-entered a gas well that had been previously abandoned near Kenai, Alaska.

White signed a top lease on land holding the Cannery Loop No. 2 well with the homesteader owner, his son said.

“Unocal drilled the well and Pacific Gas and Electric paid for it, and then they plugged and abandoned it, but they were holding on to it because it was part of the unit,” his son said. “Dad told the homesteader, ‘If you give me that top lease, if I get this lease back, I’ll re-enter it.’”

White got the lease and re-entered the well, and he also acquired 4,700 nearby acres that Cook Inlet Region Inc. had sold to Amoco.

White spent 35 years working on the well - known as the Mike Pelch 1 well - to bring it onto production.

The Pelch well, along with the Katalla KS-01 and Burglin 33-1 wells are currently the focus of an administrative appeal to the Alaska Superior Court against the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission over a retroactive bonding requirement imposed by the commission on Alaska Crude Corp., as operator of record.

That action likely will continue.

“My goal is to carry on and finish what he got started up there,” White’s son James said.

To capture oil and gas

“My family, my relatives all were ranchers and farmers and a lot of them had oil and gas on their properties and of course the economy of Texas, if you had a job you would be working for an oil company way back when,” White said in a 2019 interview.

“I can remember going to Kilgore, Texas, when I was probably 8, somewhere in that range; that would be like 1939,” he said. “You could step off of one drill floor to another drill floor.”

“Back in those days, if you had a city lot you could drill on it, so those guys that had city lots, they’d drill on ‘em,” White said. “Literally you could walk a block and never touch the ground, just walking on different drilling rig floors.”

Of course, they’ve changed the rules since then, he said.

White said that mineral rights don’t mean a thing if one cannot get the hydrocarbons out of the ground.

“Oil and gas can’t convert to your ownership until you get it to the surface,” he said. “The damn stuff moves below ground; it does migrate.”

In Texas, oil is said to be captured, he said.

“The Texas rule was back in those days that if you owned a piece of property if you wanted to get any production from it you had to drill it,” White said. “You had a city lot, you could put a well down on it and whatever that well would produce, you got to keep it and sell it.”

During that era, Texas produced so much oil that the price of crude went to 10 cents a barrel, he said.

“Texas had no laws governing production … the old governor at the time decided to get some laws to regulate this thing because the courts were plugged with lawsuits of all these various landowners suing each other wanting to get whatever they figured their fair share was,” he said. “The governor goes out of his door to a couple of doors down in the hall there in the capital building and goes into the Railroad Commission; he figures those guys didn’t have anything to do, and they made them the AOGCC for the state of Texas.”

They did pass rules, and things changed for the better for the pumpers, he said.

“One of the first things they figured was producing too much oil was waste; producing too much oil got its price down so much it’s not worth the money to pump it,” White said. “The rule came out that the Texas Railroad Commission could limit the amount of oil that could be produced in Texas.”

But regulation can work against the interests of the royalty owner if it prevents the owner from capturing the oil or gas, White said, adding that the new rules in Alaska requiring bonding of $400,000 per oil or gas well of any sort serve as a de facto confiscation of mineral rights.

“When Texas became a state, if you wanted to homestead, you just went out and squatted on a piece of ground, applied for it, and you got 160 acres,” White said.

In Alaska, everybody that homesteaded prior to statehood got the surface and all the oil and gas below the land, if it existed,” he said. “That was the rule and that’s what they got.”

“But in Texas, you can operate 10 wells for $25,000 cash,” he said. “Of course, you can’t do that up there; they want you to put up $400,000 a well.”

“It’s obvious, I don’t know any homesteader that’s got $400,000 laying around most of the month for him to drill a 100-foot well in his back yard,” he said.

“The story needs to be told,” White said. “It’s still America.”

- STEVE SUTHERLIN