Oil, that is ...
The desire to prospect for oil in the western half of the state has increased right along with oil prices. And some of those looking for black gold are using what your granddad may have used to look for water — dowsing rods.
BY NATE JENKINS | Lincoln Journal Star
WAUNETA — The brass is really working now, gyrating inside Richard Romine’s SUV like an unhinged helicopter propeller, nearly swiping a pink dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror and a bottle that holds the spit-end of his Copenhagen habit.
In the beginning, it was a quiet art: Contemplate the water and oil below, succumb to it, let the rod show you what your body knows.
“Now, I can have a conversation and do it,” Romine says while driving down a dirt road. He’s holding an L-shaped brass “dowsing” rod with a horizontal section that swivels freely from the vertical end he’s gripping.
Romine doesn’t pay it much mind. He handles it like a doodad picked up off the floorboard to pass the drive time.
“I’ve done it out of an airplane,” he says.
Interpreting the signals Romine says are transmitted through the hodgepodge of dowsing rods stashed in his Tahoe is easier than telling time. It’s also crudely rudimentary compared to reading the seismic data and surface geological mapping used by oil-prospecting geoscientists.
If there’s oil below, the rod twirls clockwise, Romine said. Counterclockwise means water.
Romine sets the rod down and stuffs a wad of snuff behind his lip. Then he picks the rod up and turns his truck toward a pasture disrupted by what looks like a crater.
The rod twirls clockwise. Romine gets excited.
“That’s oil.”
Wildcats return
Big oil companies have never pinned Nebraska as a main destination on their strategy maps. Other locales holding 50 million and more barrels of oil monopolize their attention.
But in the parallel universe where Romine has resided since he began looking for oil about 1½ years ago, there is just enough to make those with money and guts salivate.
Nebraska ranks 22nd among states for oil production, with more than 2.5 million barrels pumped out last year.
It also ranks 22nd among states for quantity, according to the federal Department of Energy.
After a decades-long dormancy, interest in searching for the state’s black gold has been reignited by an extended period of high oil prices.
So far this year, the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has issued more than 80 well-drilling permits — up from 77 for all of last year, and 43 the year before.
Bill Sydow, director of the commission, attributes the increase to higher oil prices. He likes the trend, but doubts it will blossom into a substantial boom because of a 20-year decline in the number of companies looking for oil.
The oil boom that erupted in the 1960s near McCook, Sidney and Kimball quieted to a whisper by the late 1980s. The money dried up, drillers poked fewer holes, rough-necks and others with the know-how and willingness to do the dangerous work got other jobs or left the state.
Nationally, the number of oil-prospecting companies declined.
Howard Kaler is among those who stuck with Nebraska, a state he said epitomizes the creed that “good land makes good people.”
A big play of oil near Kimball and Sidney in the late 1960s brought him to the state, and the rigs operated by his company, Texas-based Kaler Oil, were soon drilling holes as investors prayed for a payoff.
At one time, the company had five rigs and dozens of employees.
When oil prices bottomed out and took prospectors with them, “we battened down the hatches and rode out the cheap oil,” he says in his Texas drawl.
Kaler shut down the rigs in 1990 and parked them in Hamlet, just east of Wauneta.
High oil prices have given Kaler the fever again. He also sensed the fever in others with the money to seek a cure.
So this spring he pulled one of his rigs out of storage.
From 1990 until earlier this year, Kaler Oil drilled about two wells a year in Nebraska using another company’s equipment.
The number drilled since Kaler fired up its own rig again this year:18.
The company that barely maintained a presence in the state the last 15 years now has a three- to four-month waiting list for people who want wells drilled.
“Everybody’s really busy now,” Kaler said. “People are investing a lot of money again in drilling these wildcat wells,” in counties including Dundy, Hitchcock, Hayes, Red Willow and Furnas.
Kaler would crank up the other four rigs to meet demand, but can’t round up enough workers — even though rig work pays an average of $17 an hour.
“When the boom was going, lots of (workers) were coming in, but it’s been so long ago, you can’t hardly find people anymore to work on rigs,” said Lilie Coleman of Coleman Oil in McCook.
The promise of oil in the nearby Sleepy Hollow oil field brought Coleman and her husband to the McCook area in the 1960s.
Coleman’s company mainly services rigs now, but used to drill its own wells. Her husband, she said, would be drilling again if he were alive because of high oil prices — and using dowsers like Romine to find it.
“A lot of people can do it, a lot of people can’t,” said Coleman.
Mainstream scientists have long disputed the idea that people can pinpoint minerals hundreds — even thousands — of feet below the surface by holding a branch or brass or any other so-called dowsing rod.
But that doesn’t bother Sydow, the state oil and gas director.
A self-described “new Earth creationist,” Sydow says the business of prospecting should be waged with imagination and intuition.
He even believes it’s possible some oil is derived from a chemistry not directly linked to plants and animals that decayed at the bottom of ancient seas and lagoons, the known source of oil.
Dowsing?
“I’ve seen it work,” Sydow said.
“Oil and gas,” he added, “is found in the minds of men.”
Why not?
The old man wasn’t impressed. He had taught Romine to use the rods, and now Romine wanted him to feel out a piece of property where he was sure there was oil.
The old man didn’t feel much.
Driven by an old memory embedded by family, a kernel that grew into belief, Romine persisted.
“There’s oil on this property, I just know it,” Romine remembers his granddad saying as they walked to the mailbox.
He peeled the vehicle off the perimeter of the property and drove inside the section. The old man soon saw something that gave him reason to believe, too.
Prairie dogs.
“That’s my mascot,” Romine recalls the man saying. “There’s something there.”
Romine jumped in with both feet, building up some oil-prospecting contacts, bringing more dowsers into the area. Four of the five, he said, detected oil.
A group of investors was rounded up.
They used more than rod work to help detect oil, including radiometric mapping. Prospectors use it to help find subsurface high spots by measuring variations in the natural radiation of an area. The measurements showed a likelihood oil was there, Romine said.
Even with the information, “you can’t see 4,800 feet down,” Romine said.
“You just don’t know until you poke the hole. You take your best odds and do it.”
Romine, 55, who owns a bar in Wauneta, describes his foray into prospecting as more spontaneous combustion than epiphany. A quote he read 1½ year ago from former President Theodore Roosevelt spurred him on: “Why not go out on a limb?”
Romine gathered up about $125,000 from the investors and called Kaler Oil.
The company brought its rig to the prairie dog town in mid-October and drilled down to the shale. Surface casings were set for the pipe to protect groundwater, concrete poured around it. When the round-the-clock drilling started, Romine stayed — all night, sleeping in his Tahoe.
Over four days, the drill bore down.
Finally, at 4,672 feet, Romine learned a lesson: “When a hole comes up dry, your heart goes right down to your toes.”
He and Kaler said the drilling showed oil but they may have picked the wrong spot and possibly quit drilling too soon — an easy decision to make, Romine said, when it costs about $14 per foot.
They also encountered problems during the drilling.
Romine was, and remains, undeterred. “If you’re gonna get good at this game, you’ve got to go in with both feet, and stay.”
Over the next year, he and a group of four other investors plan on drilling five more spots in Nebraska and even more in Kansas. Of the five holes drilled in Kansas so far, one has resulted in a producing well. Another looks promising, Romine said.
Using his drive-by dowsing method, Romine says he has detected enough oil to spend the rest of his days drilling.
“Is it hocus pocus?” Romine says of dowsing. “I don’t know.”
He takes a long pause when asked if he’s absolutely certain dowsing works, replying that “it’s more reliable than anything else.”
But he’ll do things a little different next time. He’s going to blow some dynamite to help find domes in the subsurface where oil is more likely to surface.
He’s got another place in mind already, and will have Kaler do the drilling in the spring. He plans on using his rods to find the right spot.
The area?
Romine already has it picked: The prairie dog town where he came up dry in October.
“There’s oil in that son of a bitch,” he said while holding a plastic dowsing rod with a vial of oil attached to it.
“I just know it.”
Reach Nate Jenkins at 473-7223 or njenkins@journalstar.com.
BY NATE JENKINS | Lincoln Journal Star
WAUNETA — The brass is really working now, gyrating inside Richard Romine’s SUV like an unhinged helicopter propeller, nearly swiping a pink dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror and a bottle that holds the spit-end of his Copenhagen habit.
In the beginning, it was a quiet art: Contemplate the water and oil below, succumb to it, let the rod show you what your body knows.
“Now, I can have a conversation and do it,” Romine says while driving down a dirt road. He’s holding an L-shaped brass “dowsing” rod with a horizontal section that swivels freely from the vertical end he’s gripping.
Romine doesn’t pay it much mind. He handles it like a doodad picked up off the floorboard to pass the drive time.
“I’ve done it out of an airplane,” he says.
Interpreting the signals Romine says are transmitted through the hodgepodge of dowsing rods stashed in his Tahoe is easier than telling time. It’s also crudely rudimentary compared to reading the seismic data and surface geological mapping used by oil-prospecting geoscientists.
If there’s oil below, the rod twirls clockwise, Romine said. Counterclockwise means water.
Romine sets the rod down and stuffs a wad of snuff behind his lip. Then he picks the rod up and turns his truck toward a pasture disrupted by what looks like a crater.
The rod twirls clockwise. Romine gets excited.
“That’s oil.”
Wildcats return
Big oil companies have never pinned Nebraska as a main destination on their strategy maps. Other locales holding 50 million and more barrels of oil monopolize their attention.
But in the parallel universe where Romine has resided since he began looking for oil about 1½ years ago, there is just enough to make those with money and guts salivate.
Nebraska ranks 22nd among states for oil production, with more than 2.5 million barrels pumped out last year.
It also ranks 22nd among states for quantity, according to the federal Department of Energy.
After a decades-long dormancy, interest in searching for the state’s black gold has been reignited by an extended period of high oil prices.
So far this year, the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has issued more than 80 well-drilling permits — up from 77 for all of last year, and 43 the year before.
Bill Sydow, director of the commission, attributes the increase to higher oil prices. He likes the trend, but doubts it will blossom into a substantial boom because of a 20-year decline in the number of companies looking for oil.
The oil boom that erupted in the 1960s near McCook, Sidney and Kimball quieted to a whisper by the late 1980s. The money dried up, drillers poked fewer holes, rough-necks and others with the know-how and willingness to do the dangerous work got other jobs or left the state.
Nationally, the number of oil-prospecting companies declined.
Howard Kaler is among those who stuck with Nebraska, a state he said epitomizes the creed that “good land makes good people.”
A big play of oil near Kimball and Sidney in the late 1960s brought him to the state, and the rigs operated by his company, Texas-based Kaler Oil, were soon drilling holes as investors prayed for a payoff.
At one time, the company had five rigs and dozens of employees.
When oil prices bottomed out and took prospectors with them, “we battened down the hatches and rode out the cheap oil,” he says in his Texas drawl.
Kaler shut down the rigs in 1990 and parked them in Hamlet, just east of Wauneta.
High oil prices have given Kaler the fever again. He also sensed the fever in others with the money to seek a cure.
So this spring he pulled one of his rigs out of storage.
From 1990 until earlier this year, Kaler Oil drilled about two wells a year in Nebraska using another company’s equipment.
The number drilled since Kaler fired up its own rig again this year:18.
The company that barely maintained a presence in the state the last 15 years now has a three- to four-month waiting list for people who want wells drilled.
“Everybody’s really busy now,” Kaler said. “People are investing a lot of money again in drilling these wildcat wells,” in counties including Dundy, Hitchcock, Hayes, Red Willow and Furnas.
Kaler would crank up the other four rigs to meet demand, but can’t round up enough workers — even though rig work pays an average of $17 an hour.
“When the boom was going, lots of (workers) were coming in, but it’s been so long ago, you can’t hardly find people anymore to work on rigs,” said Lilie Coleman of Coleman Oil in McCook.
The promise of oil in the nearby Sleepy Hollow oil field brought Coleman and her husband to the McCook area in the 1960s.
Coleman’s company mainly services rigs now, but used to drill its own wells. Her husband, she said, would be drilling again if he were alive because of high oil prices — and using dowsers like Romine to find it.
“A lot of people can do it, a lot of people can’t,” said Coleman.
Mainstream scientists have long disputed the idea that people can pinpoint minerals hundreds — even thousands — of feet below the surface by holding a branch or brass or any other so-called dowsing rod.
But that doesn’t bother Sydow, the state oil and gas director.
A self-described “new Earth creationist,” Sydow says the business of prospecting should be waged with imagination and intuition.
He even believes it’s possible some oil is derived from a chemistry not directly linked to plants and animals that decayed at the bottom of ancient seas and lagoons, the known source of oil.
Dowsing?
“I’ve seen it work,” Sydow said.
“Oil and gas,” he added, “is found in the minds of men.”
Why not?
The old man wasn’t impressed. He had taught Romine to use the rods, and now Romine wanted him to feel out a piece of property where he was sure there was oil.
The old man didn’t feel much.
Driven by an old memory embedded by family, a kernel that grew into belief, Romine persisted.
“There’s oil on this property, I just know it,” Romine remembers his granddad saying as they walked to the mailbox.
He peeled the vehicle off the perimeter of the property and drove inside the section. The old man soon saw something that gave him reason to believe, too.
Prairie dogs.
“That’s my mascot,” Romine recalls the man saying. “There’s something there.”
Romine jumped in with both feet, building up some oil-prospecting contacts, bringing more dowsers into the area. Four of the five, he said, detected oil.
A group of investors was rounded up.
They used more than rod work to help detect oil, including radiometric mapping. Prospectors use it to help find subsurface high spots by measuring variations in the natural radiation of an area. The measurements showed a likelihood oil was there, Romine said.
Even with the information, “you can’t see 4,800 feet down,” Romine said.
“You just don’t know until you poke the hole. You take your best odds and do it.”
Romine, 55, who owns a bar in Wauneta, describes his foray into prospecting as more spontaneous combustion than epiphany. A quote he read 1½ year ago from former President Theodore Roosevelt spurred him on: “Why not go out on a limb?”
Romine gathered up about $125,000 from the investors and called Kaler Oil.
The company brought its rig to the prairie dog town in mid-October and drilled down to the shale. Surface casings were set for the pipe to protect groundwater, concrete poured around it. When the round-the-clock drilling started, Romine stayed — all night, sleeping in his Tahoe.
Over four days, the drill bore down.
Finally, at 4,672 feet, Romine learned a lesson: “When a hole comes up dry, your heart goes right down to your toes.”
He and Kaler said the drilling showed oil but they may have picked the wrong spot and possibly quit drilling too soon — an easy decision to make, Romine said, when it costs about $14 per foot.
They also encountered problems during the drilling.
Romine was, and remains, undeterred. “If you’re gonna get good at this game, you’ve got to go in with both feet, and stay.”
Over the next year, he and a group of four other investors plan on drilling five more spots in Nebraska and even more in Kansas. Of the five holes drilled in Kansas so far, one has resulted in a producing well. Another looks promising, Romine said.
Using his drive-by dowsing method, Romine says he has detected enough oil to spend the rest of his days drilling.
“Is it hocus pocus?” Romine says of dowsing. “I don’t know.”
He takes a long pause when asked if he’s absolutely certain dowsing works, replying that “it’s more reliable than anything else.”
But he’ll do things a little different next time. He’s going to blow some dynamite to help find domes in the subsurface where oil is more likely to surface.
He’s got another place in mind already, and will have Kaler do the drilling in the spring. He plans on using his rods to find the right spot.
The area?
Romine already has it picked: The prairie dog town where he came up dry in October.
“There’s oil in that son of a bitch,” he said while holding a plastic dowsing rod with a vial of oil attached to it.
“I just know it.”
Reach Nate Jenkins at 473-7223 or njenkins@journalstar.com.
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