Amerada's New Find

Oilmen acknowledge Alfred Jacobsen, Amerada Petroleum's president, as king of the explorers. After others had vainly scouted the Williston Basin since the early '20s, Jacobsen last year sank the well that tapped one of the country's richest oil pools. But shrewd Oilman Jacobsen did not rest on the triumph; he already had his seismograph crews roaming north west Alberta in a hunt for new treasure. Oilmen have long guessed that an oil-rich coral-reef formation underlies Alberta's Peace River Basin, about 200 miles northwest of Canada's vast Leduc field, and have spent years hunting for it.

Amerada drilled a wildcat well 10,278 ft. deep, 50 miles east of the town of Grande Prairie. The drillers found only water, but discovery of the reef itself gave Jacobsen's geophysicists the clues they needed. They believed that by moving three-quarters of a mile away they could hit the reef again at a higher point. Last week they did. At 9,000 ft. they finally struck a heavy flow of good crude. It was the first major producing well in the region. ''Amerada has found something that has us all sitting up and taking notice," said a rival geologist enviously. "Most geologists in the Canadian oil play are convinced there is another Leduc or Redwater, or maybe several of them, in the basin." Once more, Amerada's hard-drilling Jacobsen was out ahead of the rigs: he had already sewn up almost 700,000 acres of the likeliest sites in the Peace River region.

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