The Davis family has owned ranchland on the high-desert prairie of El Paso County in Colorado for the past century. Family lore recalls a prophecy of wealth from the Depression years. A geologist came through the desolate region, nestled on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and told the family there might be oil under their land.
In the seven decades since the 1930s, there hasn’t been a single successful oil well on the Davis land – or anywhere else in all of El Paso County, a mostly rural region located south of Denver.
Now, however, subsurface fracturing – or fracking – technology so widely used in natural gas drilling is beginning to unlock oil reserves long considered impossible to tap successfully, like the suddenly prolific Bakken play in North Dakota.
The Gobe and Mail
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