Earl is in rare form this morning! Must be the reaction from being over run by kids in pajamas before Christmas.
For what it is worth, regarding Gramps Field, I did a little study on Archuleta County and its oil potential back in 1984 for a group of clients who were looking at a large tract of acreage that offset the Gramps field. Here are some salient facts that came out of that study.
The field was discovered in 1936 by Lafayette Hughes, whose wife Anne Clifton Hughes inherited the Banded Peak Ranch from her grandfather, William Hughes. She named the field Gramps in honor of her grandfather.
The Hughes family owned the ranch and the minerals, drilled all of the wells on the ranch and thus owned 100% of all of the oil produced from the field. This is a very unusual situation in the US as most oil is found by companies and operators who lease the minerals from the owners and pay them a royalty.
The field originally produced from the Dakota Sandstone at about 1100 feet deep and had an areal extend of about 130 acres. Over the years, several other formations, such as the deeper Morrison formation were found to be oil productive and the area of the field expanded. The Colorado Oil and Gas commission shows the defined area of the field at over 1500 acres, but only a small part of that was actually capable of oil production, as numerous dry holes have been drilled within the field area.
Over the history of the field, at various times, depending on how many wells were on production and their producing rates, the field has produced at rates up to about 1200 barrels of oil per day during World War 2, but when I did my study, the field was down to about 130 BOPD from 26 wells, and 2600 barrels of salt water per day. That is an average production rate at that time of about 5 BOPD and 100 BSWPD.
The best single well in the field was the Hughes #5 Gramps which actually came in at around 2000 BOPD in 1936.
Records of the Colorado Oil and Gas commission showed that production stopped before 1996, and the field was basically plugged out by July, 1996.
