Bryan Burrough (24 page)

The Big Four’s real contribution to the effort, though, was not their energy but their oil. A single destroyer burned an average of three thousand gallons of oil every hour. One tank required ten thousand gallons of gasoline to drive one hundred miles. A single four-engine bomber used up to four hundred gallons of high-octane jet fuel per hour. The utility, and to some extent the size, of an army was directly linked to its oil supply. Even before Pearl Harbor, that made Texas oil a critical natural resource. Roy Cullen’s Tom O’Connor Field produced crude that made ideal jet fuel; when war came, the field was cordoned off and all approaches patrolled by military police.

The day the Japanese attacked Hawaii, 90 percent of Texas oil reached the East Coast in tanker ships sailing from the ports around Houston; the rest was shipped in rail cars. It was oil, much of it from East Texas, that heated Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and kept their automobiles running. That made the sea-lanes from Texas around Florida the nation’s most critical transportation route. Even before fighting began, the White House worried about protecting them, and rightly so. World War II arrived on the continent just a month after Pearl Harbor, when a German U-boat sank the tanker
Norness
off Long Island on the night of January 14, 1942. In the next five months Nazi subs sank 171 ships between Florida and New York, another 62 in the Gulf of Mexico. Texas oil was still arriving on the East Coast; unfortunately, it was washing up on its beaches. Fuel deliveries to the East Coast fell by 90 percent. Consumer rationing was instituted. Gas shortages struck Washington, New York, and Boston. At the White House, Harold Ickes’s people estimated it would take a train of seven thousand rail cars—fifty miles long—to replace the fuel that was being lost every day.

The obvious solution was a pipeline; as one Texas oilman quipped, “you can’t sink a pipeline.” Unfortunately, no one had ever attempted a pipeline as long as would be needed: 1,254 miles, the distance between Longview, in the heart of East Texas, to the nearest eastern refineries outside Philadelphia. Ickes had urged construction of a pipeline as early as December 1940. Now it would be built—and fast. There would actually be two, one for oil, dubbed the Big Inch, and a second smaller pipe for oil products such as kerosene, the Little Inch. Their size dwarfed anything in existence. Most American pipelines were eight inches in diameter or smaller; the Big Inch alone would be twenty-four inches around, the Little Inch twenty inches; together they would carry more than five times as much oil as any pipeline in the world. The job of getting them built fell to the liberal Texas oilman J. R. Parten, who had gone to work for the government petroleum bureau.

The Inch pipelines, however, did not enjoy unanimous support. A number of competing proposals sprang up that spring. As a stopgap measure, the government studied ways to get oil across Florida, which would at least avoid the shipping lanes south of Miami. A Florida group pushed for an eighty-million-dollar canal; tanks of oil could be floated across in barges. Parten thought of something cheaper. He remembered one of Clint Murchison’s East Texas pipelines that had been used to funnel hot oil during the Depression but had fallen into disuse. Parten telephoned Murchison’s office and asked whether the pipe could be dug up and reassembled across northern Florida. Murchison’s men were at work in no time. Their new pipeline would ship its first oil in June 1943.

The issue of a Texas-to-East-Coast pipeline, however, remained up in the air. In June 1942 a House committee recommended building a 580-mile pipeline from the Tinsley oil field in Mississippi to Charleston or Savannah. To Parten’s dismay, the bill passed. This new initiative, Parten realized, represented a dangerous alliance between several opponents to the Inch lines, not only politicians from South Carolina and Florida, but a man Parten had first met twenty years earlier when he was running an Arkansas gambling house: H. L. Hunt. It was Hunt and his son Hassie who controlled most of the Tinsley Field, an area Parten knew was already in decline; a pipeline linking it to East Coast ports would allow the Hunts to reach market, but it wouldn’t make a dent in demand.

Parten discovered that the Tinsley pipeline was the first stage in what Hunt and his partners envisioned to be an even longer pipeline originating in Wichita Falls. Parten had already vetoed both ideas, even after one of Hunt’s partners warned he would face “a great deal of political heat.” The matter came to a head at a hearing in late June, where those testifying on behalf of Hunt’s pipeline included, of all people, Hassie Hunt, whose job advising the Chinese government consisted mostly of laying around the Mayflower Hotel and chasing girls. The Hunts and their allies had their say, but in the end an army report favoring the Texas-to-Philadelphia route won out.

To build it, Parten hired a Texaco pipeline man named Bert Hull. Hull quickly assembled an army of fifteen thousand grizzled roughnecks. They worked in four groups, one each on eastern and western sections of both pipelines. It was a monumental task. Thousands of miles of American countryside had to be surveyed and cleared; tunnels had to be bored beneath the Mississippi and two hundred other rivers, streams, and lakes; almost three thousand miles of four-foot trenches had to be dug. Hull’s crews laid the first pipe on August 3, 1942. Massive trucks delivered forty-foot sections of pipe to the crews around the clock; each section weighed two tons, and each had to be welded, sunk in the ground, and buried. On a good day, nine miles of pipe disappeared into the earth.

That winter, floods washed away entire sections of pipe waiting to be laid at the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers. At the Mississippi, Hull’s men managed to pull tons of pipe from the river mud and have it back in place in just two days. The Arkansas River damage took longer, forcing crews to stow seven miles of pipe in the streets of Little Rock. By January 1943, after barely six months of work, Hull’s men had finished the initial 531 miles of the Big Inch. In February, as crews furiously worked to finish the rest, the first shipment of Texas oil flowed through the line to Norris City, Illinois, where more than a thousand railroad cars waited to take it east. Six months later the entire line was completed, and the first oil flowed from East Texas into the Sun Oil refineries at Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania. It was the world’s longest pipeline, an extraordinary engineering achievement.

When the war was finally won, American oil was among the heroes. The Allies, it was said, “floated to victory on a sea of oil,” and by and large it was Texas Oil, a good deal of it owned by the Big Four families. Between 1941 and 1945 the Axis powers produced an estimated 276 million barrels; in the same time span, Texas produced more than 500 million, 100 million from Hunt’s East Texas fields alone. As Axis leaders acknowledged, they couldn’t compete with the Allies’ supply of aviation fuel and gasoline. “This is a war of engines and octanes,” Joseph Stalin said in a toast to Winston Churchill in Moscow. “I drink to the American auto industry and the American oil industry.”

If the Inch lines helped win the war for the Allies, they would win the peace for Texas Oil. When the federal government began auctioning off sixteen billion dollars of wartime factories and industrial assets in 1945, the two pipelines became the focus of intense speculation. Everyone had an idea what should be done with them. The most innovative suggested converting them for use transporting a product that for decades oilmen had simply thrown away: natural gas. A methane-rich vapor found in most oil and coal deposits, gas had been identified as early as 1683. Gas lighting had been used in British factories since the early 1800s, and while some American cities began using gas streetlamps after the Civil War, it had never been widely accepted as an alternative to traditional heating oils. Well into the 1940s American oilmen burned off more natural gas—a process called “flaring”—than the entire country saw fit to use. An oil scout cruising West Texas one night in 1945 wrote that it felt like driving through a city—thousands of gas flares lighting the night sky for miles around. One town, Denver City, out near the New Mexico border, was wreathed with so many flares it didn’t use streetlights for years.
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But, as happened after World War I, American energy demand soared after World War II, bringing yet another round of gasoline shortages. A new oil-drilling boom was soon under way. But by early 1946, when the Inch lines were put up for auction, there were already widespread calls, in Congress and elsewhere, that the nation’s electrical utilities convert at least some of their plants to natural gas. Consumer advocates, realizing that gas could be much cheaper than oil, saw the future of home-heating and appliances. Texas Oil saw the future of its profits. The specter of one of its waste products heating all of Boston and New York and Philadelphia, and having it pumped directly there via an existing pipeline—it was the kind of treasure not seen since Spindletop or the East Texas field. Every major oilman in Texas began looking for ways to get his hands on the Inch lines.

Hunt joined one bidding syndicate, Murchison and Richardson another. Their bids, along with fourteen others, arrived in Washington that summer. The government needed more time to value the pipelines, so a second round of bidding was set for February 1947. In the interim, a new company, Tennessee Gas, was allowed to lease the lines, proving they could safely transport gas. When the final offers were opened, the winner, with a bid of $143 million, was a Houston group led by Lyndon Johnson’s main financial backers, George and Herman Brown. They called their company Texas Eastern, and their goal was bringing Texas natural gas to the cities of the Northeast.

Within weeks utilities in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston announced widespread conversions to natural gas. The first Texas gas flowed through the new Texas Eastern-owned Inch lines into Philadelphia’s Tilghman Street Gas Plant in September 1948. Even as other southwestern groups announced plans to build competing pipelines, Texas Eastern moved into New York. On August 17, 1949, the mayor of New York City, William O’Dwyer, stood in a Consolidated Edison plant on the north shore of Staten Island. When a worker nodded his head, the mayor twisted a valve, releasing the first whiffs of Texas natural gas into a storage tank, where it was soon put to use warming apartments on Park Avenue and cooking meat loafs in Sheepshead Bay.

It was the beginning of a new era. Across America thousands of homeowners switched to cleaner, cheaper gas furnaces and appliances. Between 1945 and 1951, gas sales nationwide doubled. Everywhere, new pipelines were laid; one of the largest, the so-called Bigger Inch line built by El Paso Natural Gas, brought Texas gas to the burgeoning suburbs of Southern California, which quickly became the nation’s single largest gas market. For Texas oilmen profits were stupendous. The men who bought Texas Eastern saw their stock, bought for $150,000, leap in value to almost $10 million in less than a year. H. L. Hunt’s fields alone supplied a full quarter of the gas Texas Eastern brought to northeastern cities. Sid Richardson’s Winkler County fields became the foundation of El Paso Natural Gas’s supply; Richardson’s gas lit up much of Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. For Hunt and Richardson, and for scores of other oilmen, it was found money.

And not a moment too soon.

At mid-century America was the acknowledged king of oil-producing countries, pumping 63 percent of the world supply in 1941, and Texas was its prince, leading all states in production year after year. At the height of war in 1943 came the first hint of a serious challenge to these crowns. It rose in a land of desert nomads most Texans knew only from the tales of Sinbad: Arabia. Harold Ickes heard about it first. As the nation’s wartime petroleum czar, Ickes spent the war worrying that America would run out of oil. In his search for more, he had his men study every corner of the globe, and as they did, they read of a smattering of small discoveries in the Persian Gulf, in some kind of sheikhdom called Bahrain in 1932, in something called Kuwait six years later. British crews had actually managed to fill an entire tanker with Arab oil in 1939, and three years later, as Erwin Rommel’s Panzers rumbled into Egypt, Ickes decided it was time to find out how much lay in Rommel’s path. This called for a mission of the utmost secrecy, for which Ickes selected a most unusual Texas oilman, Everette DeGolyer.

DeGolyer wasn’t an actual Texan—he was raised in Oklahoma—and he wasn’t an actual oilman. He was a geophysicist, probably the world’s best. Short and rumpled, with an enormous head and roving intellect—in later years he purchased the
Saturday Review
—DeGolyer made his name while still an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma in 1910, bringing in a gusher that inaugurated the golden age of Mexican oil. He had gone on to cofound the Amerada oil company, where he pioneered the use of the seismograph; colleagues kidded DeGolyer that he was “crazy with dynamite.” He had moved to Dallas in 1936 to start his own geophysical consulting firm, and by the time Ickes loaded him onto a cargo plane for the Persian Gulf in 1943, he was among the oil industry’s most respected voices.

Hopscotching from Miami through the Caribbean, then onto Brazil and Africa, DeGolyer arrived in the Middle East to find a land bleaker than anything he had seen in West Texas. “In fact,” he wrote his wife midway through a tour of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, “Texas is a garden compared to some places we have been.” But the geology, DeGolyer discovered, was a thing of beauty. The more he studied it, the more excited he became. The petty sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, he realized between desert meals with menacing Bedouin, sat atop an ocean of oil that dwarfed anything the world had ever seen. By the time he returned to Washington, DeGolyer was certain he had glimpsed the future. A conservative man, he estimated the Persian Gulf’s reserves at twenty-five billion barrels—a guess that further studies drove as high as three hundred billion barrels. “The oil in this region,” a man who accompanied DeGolyer wrote, “is the greatest single prize in all history.”