At 89 A Wildcatter Strikes Again

摘要

At 3:30 a.m. on jan. 10 oil and gas tycoon W.A. (Tex) Moncrief Jr. was woken up by a phone call. On the line was James Robert Moffett, cochairman of McMoran Exploration. "Jim Bob told me, 'Tex, we got it,"' says the 89-year-old Moncrief. "It looks like we got something by the tail."rnThat something might be one of the biggest natural gas discoveries in the U.S. in decades. Known as Davy Jones, the field in the waters off Louisiana holds as much as 6 trillion cubic feet of gas (the energy equivalent of roughly 1 billion barrels of oil). Drilled to 28,000 feet below sea level, it cost some $100 million.