The sheikh of Dorset
Anthony Mockler
Major Ryder, a somewhat hobbit-like figure, leaned on his lawnmower and pointed out over his ancestral acres. `Over there,' he said, 'about a mile away through the trees, you can just make it out. That's the gathering station but you can't see the well-heads from here.' I peered out through the evening sun over some of the most beautiful country in Dorset, heathland and woodland sweeping down to the sea, but could see nothing. Was this the notorious Dorset oilfield? Where were the derricks, the cranes, the tankers, the helicopters? Major Ryder was quietly dismissive: 'This isn't Texas, you know. Once the drilling's done, there's not very much to see. It all goes underground to the railhead. Not much gf a thing really. The oil people are very courteous. They always consult me. They make it clear that if I don't agree they'll go ahead anyway.' And what were this new oil baron's feelings about the drilling? `If you ask me if I'm glad that they found oil here, the answer would be no. From my point of view, it's just a bloody nuisance.'
All over the South of England small teams are drilling shot-holes in the first stages of prospecting for oil. The whole land mass of the United Kingdom has, in fact, been divided into `concessions' of about 150 square miles each, rights to which are leased off by the Crown to a large number of different companies. They are all at work making little holes in the ground and occa sionally (when the seismic survey is promising) drilling an exploratory well. But only once, so far, have they struck it rich — and that was in Dorset, at Wytch Farm on the Ryders' Rempstone Estate, on the Isle of Purbeck just over the water from Poole and Bournemouth.
The first strike came in January 1974, just after the first oil crisis. An oilfield was hit which turned out to be the biggest onshore oilfield in Britain and quite possibly in western Europe. 'More than we ever expected,' said Major Ryder, who admitted a little reluctantly to feeling a thrill when the strike was first flared off. and it seems that, of all the places onshore oil might have been struck, this was one of the least likely. Indeed BP had rather disdainfully allowed British Gas to have the exploration rights for the area, having in their own opinion already milked the Isle of Purbeck for what it was worth twenty years ago. The blazing cliffs of Dorset — bituminous oil shale — had given them the clue, and they had indeed struck twice: one tiny find near Wareham that still produces 70 barrels a day and a rather larger 'field' not far from Lulworth Cove, at Kimmeridge almost literally on the sea shore, that produces about 390 barrels a day. And that, they had concluded, was that.
British Gas (Exploration) Ltd drilled again — and at Wytch Farm went a few feet deeper than the original attempt. To an outsider it all seems, despite the expertise, a very hit-and-miss business. They hit, at 3-4000 feet down, a 'field' (which is really an elliptical pool of fossil fuel sandwiched between two layers of rock) about four miles long by half a mile wide. The company calculates it can produce, when on full flow (which it will be early next year), about 4000 barrels of oil a day. In cash terms of about 20 dollars a barrel that is already quite a sizeable income: roughly £40,000 a day.
The story, as it is relayed in Dorset, is that British Gas trusted their luck, and, without the help of BP, went ahead with the production on their own — but if it hadn't been for the advice of certain visiting Canadian engineers, they would never have thought of sinking a deeper well on the same site. But two and a half years ago the Canadians persuaded them to try the idea: they did, and made a new strike at roughly 6000 feet down — with a field estimated at four times the size of othe earlier one. That means 20,000 barrels a day potentially from the small upper field and the large deeper field: or in other words, a small North Sea oilfield on land, capable of producing one barrel in every hundred that we use, and one which can be tapped with far less difficulty than those under the North Sea — and at far less expense.
It is a pity that onshore oil should have to be discovered in one of the most beautiful parts of England, a naturalists' paradise, almost unspoilt, almost wild. And the disturbing implication, for some, is that there may be other, equally unsuspected oil-fields all over southern England. A battle is even now looming about the application by British Gas to drill more exploratory wells to try and determine the size of the second, deeper oilfield. It may extend under the sea into Poole Harbour, even across onto the Isle of Wight. Another offshore exploration is also in progress which, if it ever comes to anything — and the probabilities are that it Will — may mean a Forties Field in midChannel with all the attendant complications.
But at the moment the skirmish is over an exploratory well on the Goathorn Peninsula (part of the Rempstone Estate) with, in Prospect, a fierce battle over the `step-out' wells on Studland Peninsula, part of the Bankes family's Corfe Castle Estate and now a (leased) National Nature Reserve. The slogan, 'It's Dorset's OW', has not yet been officially launched, but local officials, reflecting local opinion, are beginning to wonder what, if anything, Dorset is going to get out of it all. As for the land owners, would their attitude have been different if the 1948 Act had not been passed? 'An impossible question to answer,' Major Ryder reflected. 'I have an estate, not rich land, but enough to live on. It's always been this way till now. And we were content.' But how much of that old England will survive this new search for wealth?
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