Wayne Woolsey
Woolsey Energy president
Woolsey's company is expected to start fracking in Wayne County in southern Illinois in 2015, possiblymaking his Kansas-based company the first to win a permit to do so in Illinois under a 2013 state law legalizing the drilling technique.
That's going to make him a big player in the state. If there's a boom. Stubbornly, low oil prices may hinder the state's chances for one in 2015.
Quick definition of fracking: It's a technique used get oil or natural gas out of the ground in which deep rock is fractured by injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals.
Woolsey, 83, estimated he has spent $120 million exploring for promising drilling sites — including leasing 260,000 acres — across what's known as the Illinois Basin, which covers most of Illinois and extends into southwest Indiana and western Kentucky.
Woolsey said he has built 10 vertical evaluation wells in Illinois at a cost of about $2 million each. These oil wells are more conventional, non-high-volume — also meaning less controversial — than horizontal wells, which Woolsey also hopes to pursue in 2015.
"We think there's potential, but everything's been slow because of weather, because of politics," Woolsey said. "Even when we were doing these vertical wells, it would take nine to 10 weeks to get it permitted, which was being held back purposely.
"But that's changed, and we think now we'll be able to continue doing our activity a lot better, particularly when Gov.(-elect Bruce) Rauner gets in. We already see the (state) really working with us today, which they haven't done in the past at all."
Woolsey plans to build a headquarters in Fairfield, Ill. That's about a two-hour drive east-southeast of St. Louis. As stated and underlined in a company profile: "We will know this Basin."
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