The Drilling Contract and Contractor (Page 3)

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At Atlantic No. 1, in lsd 13 Section 23, 278 ft. of surface casing were set, the well having been spudded on October 2. The well was then drilled without incident. The D-2 was diamond cored and found to be non-porous, As was the habit in those days, the well was completed in the D-3 "barefoot",¹⁸ It was put on production early in November with an initial potential of 2,900 barrels a day.

It is instructive to note what Denton and Spencer said in their report on Atlantic No.1 under the heading "Acknowledgements'':

Central Leduc Oils (Pyrcz lease) made available a complete separator hook-up which facilitated the completion of the well and saved considerable expense while awaiting the fabrication of a new unit (and Don Whitney came with it).

Leduc Consolidated (lessees of the parcel offsetting to the east) made available a casing head, string of tubing, tanks, line pipe which could not otherwise be obtained, (This firm later tried to sue Atlantic.)

Imperial Oil loaned their swabbing equipment for the completion of the well.

Mr. Aubrey Kerr, Chief Geologist for Imperial Oil, made available his experience and advice regarding the value of the zones cored and the proper position to locate the casing shoe. The drilling contractor, General Petroleum Limited, through their Superintendent, Mr. G.A. Wright, and toolpusher W.Murray, performed all operations in a workmanlike manner.

Mr. F. McMahon and Mr. B. Lacey(!) were available at all times either in person or by telephone for advice regarding production equipment and procedures...¹⁹ There is no mention of Lyle Caspell being involved.

Langston's "Conclusions and Recommendations", (page 30 of the same report) point up his care and concern for good engineering practices. He elaborates on the flush production which occurred on November 14, the well producing about 120 barrels an hour with back pressure on the tubing of about 300 psi and separator pressure 105 psi, He suggested that rates of flow should be restricted to 150 barrels per day.

...Every effort should be made to produce the well at the maximum rate in line with good practice, bearing in mind that an error on the low side would have no ill effect but that an error on the high side might greatly decrease the value of the property and lower the ultimate recovery during its economic life.

Drilling operations then moved over to No, 2 well site, a quarter of a mile east of No. 1, in lsd 14 Section 23, It was spudded on November 27 and only 279 ft. of surface pipe were run. Trouble occurred by loss of circulation in the D-3; it was successfully overcome, Langston recalls that he warned Atlantic of the seriousness of this but no special notice appears to have been taken, The well was ultimately cased on December 29 and was placed on production January 9, 1948 with about the same potential as No. 1.

In this history, two or three chroniclers stand out, One of them is Cal Bohme, a native of Vermilion, now senior engineer with Norwest, a Calgary based consulting firm, Earlier, in the summer of 1944 at the age of 16, he had toiled in the local dairy for $33 a month. His next job was better: washing dishes in the Chinese cafe because it paid $12.50 a week for only eight hours a day. When Cal found out that roughnecking paid $6 a day (a phenomenal amount of money!), he started at Borradaile, near Vermilion, with G.P., on very heavy oil. This area was booming because the crude, owned by the CNR, could be burnt directly under the boilers of their locomotives, thus reducing the need for imported supplies.

...We would work on the service rigs there, pulling tubing, bailing, and we'd be covered with that black heavy tarry oil from head to toe..,but at the end of the day they would give us a wash cloth and a bucket of gasoline and you'd just start washing yourself down from head to toe to get that gooey old oil off.²⁰

Cal's first exposure to a "wild well'' was at Marwayne. "We encountered a tremendous flow of water at fairly shallow depths and flooded the rig out, pretty near upset it..."²¹ It was a G.P. unit with a Hosmer; that tool turned out to be of no use there. Cal arrived in Leduc in the fall of 1947 and started at Atlantic No.2. By now his G.P. wages were $8 a day less $1.50 a day for board and room in the company camp.

When the weather turned cold, it was necessary to blow out, with natural gas, the water lines which supplied the boilers, so there would be no freezing in the lines. The water supply came from Hector's system which had a sump over in the north west corner of the lease, (later to be taken over by oil). On one occasion, gas got into the boiler house by mistake.

There was myself and Howard Blanchard²² inside of one of three boilers that provided steam for the rig and we were cleaning it out with a water hose and scraper rods...can remember the whole roof blowing off...and the terrible concussion inside the boiler and. ..Howard stuck his head out first and said, 'There's fire all over. Let's get the hell out of here' and he went out. The good thing about it, it was a very flimsy structure. It just blew all the tin sides out of the boiler house so we managed to get out of there without any serious injury.²³

Following the completion of No. 2, the next location was lsd 12 Section 23, the south offset to No. 1, The Kerber brothers recall having skidded the rig over during daylight hours, thus cutting down on rig-up time. After No. 3, the east offset to it, No. 4 was to be drilled, thus providing four producers on the quarter section. But fate now played a hand in the affairs of not only General Petroleums, Denton and Spencer and Atlantic, but also Imperial Oil, the Board and the Rebus family: the mineral and surface owners of the northwest quarter of Sectlon 23.