It’s almost 8 a.m. when Gloria Moncrief arrives at her oil firm’s hangar at Meacham Airport in Fort Worth, Texas. She climbs into an eight-seater Cessna Citation, explaining that her Boeing 737, Lucky Liz, is in the shop. The flight to a small airfield in southern Louisiana takes about an hour. Then it’s a 45-minute drive along the levee into the Atchafalaya river basin, the largest swamp in North America, followed by 15 minutes on a flat-bottomed boat past alligators, nesting bald eagles and fishermen muscling their bass boats into the bayou.

Rounding a bend in the waterway, the boat arrives at a giant drilling rig with a 150-foot-tall derrick and roaring engines. Tall and thin, decked out in jeans and knee-high ostrich-skin boots, the 44-year-old Moncrief steps onto the rig, where a handful of mud-covered roughnecks maneuver 40-foot lengths of steel pipe with massive hydraulic tongs.

Moncrief is the head of Montex Drilling Company, the family business that owns Moncrief Oil and has been spending $300,000 a day to rent the rig and staff it around the clock with 60 folks working 12-hour shifts, 14 days on, 14 days off, all to drill the second-deepest natural gas well ever in the U.S. The Highlander 2 goes down 30,862 feet (almost six miles), where it intersects an 800-foot-thick (gross) zone of sand saturated with trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. The well was recently completed after 389 days of drilling.

There is no more compelling high-wire act in the oil-and-gas industry today than this oil heiress’ all-in bet on an ultra-deep well that no one else would touch, after 20 years of disappointments and disasters in the area. The company has already spent $300 million drilling Highlander 2. Now Moncrief is looking for partners to help her fund the roughly $2 billion more needed to hook up the well, build a processing plant—and, ideally, drill five more super-deep wells.

Luckily, Moncrief has oil in her blood and grit in her genes. After both her father and grandfather died in 2021, her uncle tried to strip the company from her. No sooner had she prevailed in........

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