Black Gold In Illinois
The high price of fuel has motorists squawking, politicians investigating and oil companies denying everything. But, as CBS News Correspondent Cynthia Bowers reports, some Americans are celebrating the way oil prices have jumped in the past year.
For example, the last thing John Farmer expected to see outside his window was an oil well. His lives, after all, deep in the heart of... Illinois.
"I really didn’t believe ‘em, you know," Farmer says. "I figured back in the fifties, forties, fifties, sixties, if it was here they would have found it."
Back then drilling for oil was big business, even in the Midwest, and Illinois was this country’s 3rd leading oil producer, behind Texas and Oklahoma. But in the 1980's the market bottomed out, and the industry here was tapped out -- or so folks thought.
"A year and a half ago we were getting $8.50 a barrel," says Victor Gallagher. But with prices up to $30 a barrel now, Gallagher and other drillers who didn't go bust are enjoying a boom. He just found a million-and-a-half barrel field.
"Finding an oil field like this is like catching lightning in a bottle," he says.
New drilling is underway in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Louisiana. Last month more than 800 exploration rigs were in operation around the country, a 73 percent increase from last year’s all time low.
"We don't think it's a blip," says oil analyst Gary Ross. "We think that higher oil and gas prices are here for the next couple of years, and that's a long enough period for these people to get out and drill."
But there's a problem. Experts say that, while increased drilling could help stabilize U.S. production, it will be slow going. The reason? Hundreds of thousands of rig workers have fled the fields, leaving the industry short-handed.
"We're gonna have to train new people to run drilling rigs and produce crude from under the ground and learn how to explore for oil," Gallagher cautions.
They'll have to move quickly, too, because in the ultimate up and down business, wildcatters have to scramble to take advantage of a golden opportunity that experience tells them may not last long.