The Watch Spring

When a friend warned Paul Kayser, president of El Paso Natural Gas Co., that his blistering pace would one day make him "fly apart like a watch spring," the 68-year-old Kayser coolly replied: "Hell, when I die I'll run 15 years on momentum."

Last week Paul Kayser increased his prehumous momentum. The Federal Power Commission authorized El Paso to go into a $194 million expansion program, including construction of a 413-mile pipeline from Colorado and New Mexico's San Juan Basin to the Arizona-California border. The program will increase the El Paso system deliveries by 455,175,000 cu. ft. of natural gas a day to serve more customers in California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and New Mexico. Part of the gas will come indirectly from Canada, through a deal (also authorized by FPC last week) in which Westcoast Transmission Co. of Canada will pipe 300 million cu. ft. a day into the lines of Pacific Northwest Pipeline Corp., at the Canadian border, to supply the booming Northwest with natural gas (TIME, Dec. 27). Pacific Northwest will, in turn, sell 50 million cu. ft. to El Paso, delivering the gas through a series of exchanges.

El Paso needs more gas. It already sells, on peak days, more than 2 billion cu. ft. of gas (of which it produces 200 million itself), in markets that, says Kayser, are "sopping it up like a blotter." In total assets in 1954, El Paso ranked second among gas-pipeline companies to Tennessee Gas Transmission Co. Kayser himself, in the eyes of many gas men, ranks second to none. Says a Pacific Northwest man: "If this industry, spread out the way it is and always fighting within itself, can look on any one man as its spokesman, Mr. Kayser is the man."

Without Waste. Short, grey-haired Paul Kayser, one of few men in the oil and gas industry who is usually called Mr., was born on an East Texas farm. He attended Baylor University at the cut-rate tuition for preministerial students, decided against the ministry, took up law, eventually reimbursed Baylor for the rate cut. As a lawyer in Houston, he worked his way up to the position of top attorney for Texas Financier Jesse Jones. In 1928 he began wondering why El Paso was using costly synthetic gas. while in the Permian Basin, 200 miles away, residue gas from oil wells' was being flared as waste. Kayser raised $6,000,000 in capital, formed El Paso Natural Gas to build the pipeline. (El Paso, unlike most other gas-transmission companies, has built most of its own pipelines.) Part of the flare gas that came through this first 217-mile line turned out to be "sour"--loaded with sulphur. Nobody had ever made money from sour gas before, but Kayser and his men worked out a cheap way to remove the sulphur, sold both the sulphur and the gas.

Without Fever. Through the Depression, El Paso was kept alive by the Arizona copper industry, then spread to the growing cities of Phoenix and Tucson.

While other pipeline companies scrambled in the postwar years to divide up the rich Eastern market, El Paso poked a line westward and ended up with most of California to itself. The huge Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which until 1950 had used only California natural gas, now gets two-thirds of its gas (1.4 billion cu. ft. a day) from El Paso.

Meanwhile, the uranium boom arrived.

Kayser grew worried about his men hunting gas on the Colorado Plateau while everyone else was panting after uranium. '' "If you didn't want them to get the fever," says Kayser, "you inoculated them with a little of it." The inoculation consisted, of forming a new company, Rare Metals Corp. of America, 55% owned by El Paso, 18% by Western Natural Gas Co. (an I affiliate) and 27% by officers and employees of the companies. Rare Metals opened a mercury plant in Idaho this fall and will have a reduction mill finished in Arizona late next spring.

El Paso now owns some 5 trillion cu.

ft. of gas reserves. Its gas sales are up from some 5.4 billion cu. ft. in 1930 to 645.4 billion last year; its net income has climbed from $282,500 to more than $12.3 million. It has made itself ready for expansion by drilling and then capping gas wells all over the Southeast. Yet not even this is enough for quick-thinking Kayser; things seldom move fast enough for him. "Sometimes," he once confided to a friend in a quiet moment, "I go over and take a trip through Carlsbad Caverns and think. 'This wasn't built in a day.' " But the impression never lasts long.

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