Claytie: The Roller-Coaster Life of a Texas Wildcatter

"It's going to be the biggest change in our lives—ever!"

ForClaytieandModestaWilliams,NewYear’sEve1975would be an event like no other in a lifetime overflowing with elegant parties , global hunting trips, glorious celebrations, and too many peaks and valleys to count. When the earth shook in the wee hours of that December morning, it was not triggered by another of their amorous adventures, although Claytie contended later the 1975 experience was probably the next best thing. His Gataga #2 gas well in remote Loving County in far West Texas had just struck what would be a life-altering—and life-threatening—$40 million payday. “It was a huge event, and it changed our lives forever,” Claytie noted. Just a short time earlier, Claytie’s rig on the outskirts of Mentone , Tex., population sixty-nine, had broken through the eighteenthousand -foot mark without a hint of success or even a whiff of gas. On the evening of December 30, Wayne Roye, Claytie’s exploration manager, showed him samples retrieved from the down-hole shale formation. “It’s tight,” Claytie observed. “It’s starting to look like we’re going to get a dry hole.” Then he thought: “So here I am. I’ve put everything on the line, spent all this money. Damn!” With disappointment consuming him like a bad hangover, Claytie retired to his nearby trailer. “I went to bed, sick at heart.” A few hours later, in the early-morning darkness of December 31, the trauma of a recurring dream gripped Claytie: he was drilling a well It’s going to be the biggest change in our lives—ever!” 10 “ 132 P A R T T H R E E so costly—and apparently so stunningly noncommercial—that it could devastate him financially. Everything he’d worked for could be imperiled. “I’m lying in the driller’s trailer house brooding, halfasleep , and thinking I’ve just drilled another damn dry hole.” At 5:15 a.m. the desert began to shake with a thunderous roar. The drill bit had struck a seventeen-foot cavern containing natural gas at 18,722 feet, and a full column of fluid followed by gas began moving up toward the wellhead under abnormal pressure. The force of the flow, known in oil-patch parlance as the “initial kick,” shook the ground. A full-fledged blowout usually followed, though not always immediately. Roye ran to Claytie’s trailer. “Get out!” he yelled. “We’ve got to run. She’s gonna blow.” Gataga! First big gas flow and well test, January 1976 T H E G O - G O Y E A R S 133 The immediate danger was an explosion and fire, with poisoning also possible, for the gas contained hydrogen sulfide. Even in small amounts, hydrogen sulfide can be lethal, killing a person in minutes . Claytie and Roye began running, until they realized they were headed downwind—the direction the wind would push any toxic fumes. “That’s when we figured out the trailer was upwind,” Claytie recalled , “so we circled back to the trailer. We were in shock. It was frightening.” The trailer sat fifty yards from the well. Then, amid the chaos of the initial kick, Claytie said, “‘What do we do now?” What followed would be a daylong convulsion of oil-field drama, little-town danger, and big-time dreams—a lifeline of dreams for Claytie and Modesta. Gataga #2 did not enjoy an easy birth. Claytie had drilled a Gataga #1 nearby—a noncommercial well. Nonetheless, he was confident the Gataga field had a fifty-fifty chance to produce. These were good odds, especially considering any risk could be cushioned by Claytie’s robust finances: oil and gas prices were heading up, and Clajon was producing a healthy cash flow. All he lacked was adequate acreage under Railroad Commission requirements to drill another well within the gas-bearing formation. He hired Austin attorney Frank Douglas to confront major oil companies opposing his acreage-pooling argument. Douglas maintained that Claytie’s total adjoining acreage did in fact satisfy the regulatory agency’s rules. “We had a full-scale fight in front of the Railroad Commission and we won,” Claytie said. “We won because of Frank’s adroit abilities and because it was the little guy against the big guy, and generally the commission will tend to try to favor the little guy.” The well known as Gataga #2 commenced drilling, finally, in the winter of 1974...