OIL & GAS: Bonanza’s Bonanza

OIL & GAS

As a geologist for 32 years and a onetime professor at the Colorado School of Mines Dr. Victor Ziegler long suspected that the land around Worland, Wyo. near the Big Horn Mountain range was loaded with oil. Seven years ago, with his wife Isabella, he set out to prove it. He and his wife drove their trailer to the end of a road, then trudged miles across rugged hills and gullies, often in below-zero weather, mapping the terrain. As rodman of the surveying team, Mrs. Ziegler would hold the 4-in.-wide, 16-ft. surveying rod where Ziegler directed, was often upended into cactus plants by the wind. “It was hard work,” says Ziegler, “but it was beautiful. There were many trout streams, and Isabella is one of the finest dry-fly fishermen anywhere. Once in two casts she landed six trout, using three dry flies on one leader.”

The more they surveyed, the more beautiful it looked. Ziegler borrowed money from friends and relatives, dubbed his enterprise the Bonanza Oil Co., in five years leased some 16,000 acres. Then he started drilling near Worland. Recalls Ziegler: “Many is the time I’ve seen Isabella go to sleep in the dog house [the steel shack at the base of the rig] with the drill pumping away, her all bundled up in a sleeping bag to keep from freezing. I’ve seen it so cold that a wrench dropped on the floor of the rig would freeze there and have to be knocked loose with a crowbar.”

The first two wells were flops. Last year, as he reached the end of his resources, he brought in a gusher. As he started drilling new wells, other companies, including Phillips and Stanolind, rushed to the Worland area, sank eleven wells of their own to cash in on Bonanza’s bonanza.

Last week 65-year-old Victor Ziegler announced that he was selling out to a group of independent oilmen through Dallas’ Title Investment Co. and the Nino Oil Co. The price: about $20 million. Though Ziegler himself has had to sell most of his own holdings to pay for the leases, he and his family will get more than $5,000,000 from the Bonanza deal. The buyers will get ten wells, now producing 3,000 barrels a day, and reserves estimated at upwards of 100 million barrels. Oilmen agree that the Worland field has about five times more oil per acre than any other field in the Rockies. Says

Ziegler: “It comes out like water from a fire hydrant.”

No sooner had Ziegler announced the sale than an ex-colleague, one James R. Warren of Omaha, filed suit. Warren charged that he had prospected with Ziegler, and was entitled to 50% of Bonanza. But Ziegler, who claimed that he had paid Warren in full for his services, professed to be unworried. He dashed off to buy a $4,000 Jaguar and a $10,000 Rolls-Royce for himself (“only a small one”), a big diamond for Isabella. The rest of the money, says he, will go to developing other properties he has leased near Worland. Says Ziegler: “It will be easier this time.”