The Kingmaker’s Cheat Map
···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud!
Standing beneath the warm, viscous black rain pouring down on me, I spread my arms wide.
If anyone saw this scene now, they might think it made no sense at all.
They would point out the flaw in plausibility, ask how a reservoir could possibly exist at a depth of barely three meters, and call the whole thing unrealistic.
But that was the complaint of someone who knew one thing and not two.
······America wasn’t called a cheat-code map for nothing.
There had been no shortage of underground resources discovered at absurdly shallow depths in American history.
Gold mines, silver mines, natural gas, rare minerals, and if I limited it to oil fields alone, the list was still endless.
The Drake Oil Field, discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, was a reservoir found at a depth of only twenty-one meters and eventually produced billions of barrels.
The oil field discovered in downtown Los Angeles in 1892 lay at a depth of just three meters, and they said a single miner had dug it out by hand.
In California in 1921, oil fields were found one after another beneath ordinary houses, schoolyards, and even the middle of roads, all at depths ranging from only fifteen to sixty meters.
People who lived there would wake up in the morning to find oil gushing up from their own backyards and become millionaires overnight.
······And my case was no different.
Before my regression, this oil field belonged to a drilling company called Black Bog, and the fund company I had worked for, Black Diamond, held a controlling position as its major creditor.
I naturally ended up studying oil fields, and I still remembered the strange feeling I had when I learned that this one had erupted in the backyard of the house where I had spent my childhood long ago.
Honestly, it made my stomach ache like hell.
All those days spent walking past billions of dollars underfoot without ever recognizing what was there.
But that would never happen again.
I stood beneath the falling oil rain for a while, lost in emotion.
At last the downpour weakened, and the rain of crude came to an end as well.
The pit I had dug had now turned into a warm, sticky black swamp.
This Black Bog is mine now.
Black Bog. A black swamp.
I decided to keep the oil field’s old name exactly as it was.
What was the reserve and value of this field again?
The value in my head was based on future prices.
I converted it to 1991 prices in my mind.
A pocket oil field of one hundred million barrels.
In the industry, an oil field of that scale would usually be classified as medium-sized onshore production.
And in 1991, because of the aftermath of the Gulf War, WTI spot prices, which had been hovering around eighteen dollars a barrel, had surged to twenty-five.
The calculator in my head spun furiously.
One hundred million barrels times twenty-five dollars.
That came to 2.5 billion dollars.
In won, it was an astronomical sum approaching 250 billion won.
That number was sleeping in liquid form beneath my feet right now.
Calm down. That was only the potential value.
The only cash I actually had in hand was the ten thousand dollars my father had given me.
I was standing on a treasure island worth 2.5 billion dollars, but the money I could spend immediately was zero.
The real problem started now.
How was I supposed to turn this monster of an asset into money?
And how was I supposed to do it within a month, alone, as an underage Asian boy?
First, the most orthodox method would be...
Of course, that meant reporting the discovery to the government and selling the rights to the field to a major oil company.
Before that, I had to be careful about the difference between Surface Rights and Mineral Rights.
In short, buying land didn’t automatically mean you bought the rights to the underground resources beneath it. I had to check that carefully.
Fortunately, before leaving the house I had gone into my father’s room and checked the contract in the small safe.
Lucky for me, my father had bought both the surface rights and the mineral rights to this land together.
It was probably the kind of trick a real-estate broker pulled when they wanted to fleece an immigrant who knew nothing, tacking on mineral rights that were normally useless and selling them anyway. But in this situation, that very trick had become a windfall.
Still, even if I wanted to report it and negotiate with the majors, I didn’t have time.
At the very least, it would take two years to file the official government report and have the rights recognized.
That was because I would have to complete the state’s drilling permit process and pass the environmental impact assessment.
In an era like this, with no proper internet procedures, it would be hard for an immigrant Asian kid from the sticks to have his rights properly protected.
And it would not be easy to bargain for a fair price against the major oil companies without getting pushed around.
On top of that, when you factored in local government hearings, public consultation, opposition from civic groups, and all the rest, the orthodox route to extracting crude from the field would take about five years.
There’s the time, and there’s the cost.
If I found an oil field, geological surveying would be necessary.
I might be a regressor and know the geology here and the quality of the reservoir was excellent, but the people of this era did not.
I would have to officially certify the crude’s API gravity, sulfur content, and precise reserve volume through specialized contractors like seismic surveys and core sampling.
That alone would cost at least one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars.
Finally, once all that data was bundled into a reserve report, only then could I begin negotiations with a major oil company for a sale or a royalty contract.
...Roughly how much would all that eat up?
Using my instincts from my days as a fund manager, I sketched out a rough profit-and-loss statement.
From the total value of 2.5 billion dollars, subtract capital expenditures and operating expenses like extraction, transport, and refining, then federal taxes, state taxes, and the usual royalty rate of 12.5 to 25 percent... what would be left in my hands would probably be around five hundred million to seven hundred and fifty million dollars.
On paper alone, that was a respectable return.
But the time required to go through all of it, and the initial capital I would have to invest.
Our family could not afford any of that right now.
Before that, the house, the gas station, and this oil field would all be seized by the creditors.
Then there was only one path left.
The illegal route.
It consisted of exactly two things.
1) I would personally extract the crude here.
2) And I would refine it and sell it.
For an ordinary person, that would obviously have been impossible.
But I had the infrastructure to make it possible.
A father who ran a gas station, and one more person.
My uncle ran a scrap yard and an auto salvage lot.
Back then, my uncle had such a wide network inside the Korean community that there was no piece of equipment he couldn’t get his hands on.
My father had once said, “Your uncle is the kind of man who could drag the Titanic up from the bottom of the sea, as long as you gave him money.”
Drilling and refining could be handled to some extent with equipment I bought from my uncle. The problem was the sales channel.
Even that wasn’t bad.
My father’s gas station was practically a holy site for Korean truckers.
That was only natural, since gasoline and diesel were more than ten percent cheaper there than anywhere else.
With unlicensed fuel, I could sell it up to thirty percent cheaper and take cash only.
The current WTI wholesale price was twenty-five dollars a barrel.
Refined gasoline wholesale was much higher, around forty dollars a barrel.
The unlicensed gasoline I produced could probably be sold at about seventy percent of that, around thirty dollars a barrel.
Best of all, right now all I had to do was pump crude that was naturally gushing from the ground, so the extraction cost itself was practically zero.
Two hundred barrels a day meant six thousand dollars a day.
That was one hundred eighty thousand dollars a month.
Enough to wipe out my father’s debts and still have plenty left over.
“Good. Let’s go.”
Now that the thinking was done, it was time to use my body.
I pulled fifty-five-gallon drums out of the truck bed.
The same big drums my father used to roast sweet potatoes in when I was little.
Carrying the drums, I climbed the slope.
It was heavy and exhausting now, but if I wanted to roll them down easily later once they were packed full, I would have to accept the trouble of hauling empty drums uphill first.
At last I tossed a rubber hose into the black swamp and worked the manual hand pump.
I pressed down on the handle again and again.
Grrrrrrr... glug! glug! glug! glug! glug! glug!
Crude climbed up through the hose and poured in a torrent into the drum.
The smell was like asphalt just laid down on a road, melting in the heat.
Wearing a mask, I kept working.
Before long, the empty drum that had weighed just twenty kilograms had become a one-hundred-fifty-kilogram monster.
I sealed it tightly and rolled it down the ramp.
I had intentionally parked the truck on a gentle slope and laid tires and planks at the mouth of the bed to make a path.
Rrrr-THUNK!
One drum full of crude was loaded into the truck bed.
I rolled, stood, rolled again, and loaded the drums one after another into the truck bed.
Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip...
Crude leaked from the worn seam of the pump hose and soaked my chest waders through and through.
The black, sticky grime of oil would not wash away no matter how much sweat I poured out.
Before I knew it, my body carried the smell of my father, the smell I had hated so much as a child.
Now, though... I don’t hate this smell.
My body was heavy, but my heart felt as light as if it could lift off.
...Clunk! THUD!
The tenth and final drum settled into the truck bed.
My arms and back screamed as if they were about to break, and the blisters on my palms had burst, mixing blood with oil.
I loaded them up and headed home.
Toward Home Sweet My Home, plastered with red warning stickers all over it.
***
By the time I moved the drums into the gas station’s storage shed, dawn had broken.
But it still wasn’t over.
Even if I could afford to replace the drilling equipment later with larger, more professional machines, I needed refining equipment right now.
I could haul the crude in as-is and sell it whole, but then the margin would drop.
I had three ways to handle this crude.
1) Sell the crude directly to a refinery at a bargain price.
2) Roughly refine the crude, separate low-grade gasoline and diesel, and dump the rest as heating oil for cheap.
3) Refine the crude properly, separate high-quality gasoline and diesel, and dump the rest as heating oil for cheap.
The difference between two and three was obvious.
Low-grade gasoline, with too many impurities mixed in, was cheaper, but it also ruined cars.
In that case, I could only charge a lower price.
If I refined high-quality gasoline, I could naturally charge more, and I would also reduce the amount of waste oil I had to throw away.
There was no reason not to choose number three.
The problem was the refining equipment.
A centrifuge to separate water and sand from the crude.
An industrial furnace capable of heating crude above four hundred degrees.
A distillation tower to separate the crude into gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and the like.
A cooler to turn the vaporized oil back into liquid.
And a number of pumps, drums, storage tanks, pressure gauges, and more.
Those sorts of things should already exist at my father’s gas station. The centrifuge, furnace, distillation tower, and cooler I’d have to obtain separately. As for the specialists... well, I already had someone in mind.
I dropped the drums of crude off in the storage shed and immediately climbed back into the truck.
My destination was my uncle’s scrap yard and auto salvage lot on the edge of downtown.