Since this town was founded 104 years ago, its economy has been based on what could be produced on the fertile farmland around it.
At this time of year, farmers here are always fretting about the progress of the crops. But this summer attention is focused on the new ”cash crop”
they are trying to produce on Edward Eischeid`s soybean field, a crop that doesn`t require good weather, fertilizers or even farmers.
In the land of hogs, beans, corn and cattle, they are drilling for oil.
It is safe to say there has never been a summer like it in this town of 230 or in surrounding Carroll County, not even during Halbur`s centennial celebration four years ago. A skyline that has been dominated by bins, elevators and huge hay mounds now has a new landmark–a 178-foot blue-and-white drilling rig erected by the Amoco Production Co.
Amoco has spent more than $14 million on geological studies and in setting up the rig. It has leased thousands of acres throughout the county on the 1-in-50 chance that deep beneath the soil, buried under rocks more than 1 billion years old, lies one of the nation`s larger untapped oil reserves.
State Geologist Donald Koch said that more than 3 million acres in Iowa are under lease for mineral rights. Even the land under Elmer Dahloff`s Texaco station in downtown Halbur is leased to Amoco.
The exploration here in Carroll County is the biggest ever undertaken in Iowa and one of the largest in the Midwest.
Amoco leased 320 acres from Eischeid`s family farm corporation for $1 an acre a year for 10 years, an agreement similar to the others, and is now 12,727 feet on its way to drilling a well that will be at least 15,000 feet deep by August.
Eischeid also would receive one-eighth of all royalties from a strike.
”It seemed like a gift,” said the 68-year-old Eischeid, whose current reading includes ”A Primer on Oilwell Drilling.”
”They must think there is something down there, spending money like they did,” he said of Amoco.
Company officials are maintaining a secrecy usual in the oil business, particularly in such wildcat operations, and not even Eischeid is told about what is happening on his land. A guard and security gate block entry to the drilling site.
This tends to fuel speculation here and in other parts of the county that black gold could soon spout from the rich soil.
Amoco Production Co., the exploration and production subsidiary of Amoco Corp., is drilling in a high point of what is called the Midcontinent Rift, a folded fault in the Earth that starts at about 3,000 feet below ground level and stretches from Lake Superior to Kansas.
The rift is a formation of rocks that are 1 billion years old and represents an incomplete ”gash” in the Earth where forces tried to pull the continent apart and failed. Had the gash been completed, it would have produced something equivalent to the Red Sea in the Midwest, according to Amoco geologist Susan Landon.
Previously, the rock formations were thought to be too old to contain oil. But similar rocks of somewhat comparable age and formation in Alaska and Siberia have yielded oil, and oil has been discovered seeping from the roof of a copper mine in Michigan at the rift`s northern edge.
Texaco already has punched a hole 11,300 feet deep in northeastern Kansas, then capped the well without a word on any discovery.
In Carroll County, Landon said, tests showed an underground ”trap,”
sort of an inverted bowl, that could signal a significant reserve of oil.
”Failed rifts are good places for oil,” Landon said. ”Look at the Gulf of Suez and the North Sea.”
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”Under all the right `ifs,` ” Koch said, ”if they are answered yes, then there could be oil.”
Oil drilling is inherently speculative, though, and there is little evidence of boom-town fever in Halbur, a community with three generations of farm families, mostly of German descent, who escaped the worst of the farm crisis because they had low debt and high crop diversification.
Still, residents are doing their best to capitalize on the fortune that drilling fame has brought them.
The Eischeids have converted their front porch into a souvenir shop, where visitors can buy T-shirts, sweat shirts, headbands and buttons that say such things as, ”Hey Iowa, Let`s Get Crude,” and ”Halbur Oil Baron.” They also have a new lawn ornament, a replica of the drilling rig.
Even tickets for a raffle Saturday at the St. Augustine Parish Celebration have an Amoco oil drill printed on them. A local radio station and a hardware store sponsored a contest to predict the date, time and place that the drillers reach certain depths.
People from more than a dozen states, including Texas, California and Pennsylvania, have come to the Eischeids` impromptu shop since June. A dentist from California bought 16 T-shirts.
”On Saturdays and Sundays, cars are going by all the time,” Eischeid said. ”It`s put Halbur on that map, that`s for sure.”
Local business owners agree, saying that more money is being spent in the town`s two taverns, at the hardware store and at the service station.
”I think it`s put everybody in a better mood,” said Vern Rieselman, manager of Halbur Hardware. ”It gives us something to talk about other than corn prices.”
Over coffee at the nearby Halbur Inn, banker Jim White said townspeople realize the drilling has been a ”series of longshots” and that the chances against a big strike are great.
”This is pretty much an agricultural community,” he said. ”And over the years they have realized that you can`t count on the crops until they are in the bin.”
Word travels quickly in a small farming community such as this, and more than once someone has said he heard that drillers struck oil at Eischeid`s place. Sometimes, White said, rumors are started just to see how fast they can come back.
Levity does seem more pervasive than any jealousy about the chance that Eischeid might hit it big and others might not.
”Our neighbors are all the same as before, and they say if you don`t get an oil well, well, you don`t get an oil well,” said Eischeid`s wife, Marie.
”And we`ll all go back to farming.”AP Laserphoto