Man Fills Up From His Own Backyard Oil Well

May 27, 2008 — -- Across the country drivers are being driven to extremes to cut costs, but for one Indiana man the answer to soaring gas prices lies deep beneath his own backyard.

As prices skyrocketed, 32 million fewer Americans hit the road this Memorial Day weekend compared to last year, according to AAA. It was the first dip since Sept. 11.

To avoid the pain at the pump, Gregg Losh decided to build his own. Now he says the well in his suburban Indiana backyard is producing up to three barrels per day.

"It's a moneymaker. I don't want to say too much on it … but it's a moneymaker," Losh told ABC News correspondent Bianna Golodryga.

He stores the oil in a tank and transports it to Ohio for sale, according to local reporting from WISH-TV in Indianapolis. With the price of oil climbing to a record $135 a barrel, and many experts predicting that figure to continue rising, Losh's well is expected to be profitable by the end of the year.

"If you have one well in the backyard, probably over the course of a year you'd be earning tens of thousands of dollars, but you're not having to do any labor. It's almost like winning the lottery," said Rice University professor Amy Myers Jaffe, who directs a program studying energy science and technology policy.

Losh didn't discover his bubbling prize on his own. Having detected the hot commodity in the surrounding area, a local oil company land man approached him.

In fact, sweet crude actually flows across the country. For example, the Beverly Hills High School in California still sits atop black gold today.

According to Myers Jaffe, there is "a lot of oil in the Rocky Mountains. We have oil, of course, here in Texas and Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma."

But before you go digging in your own backyard, she says to think again.

"This really isn't something that you and I could go out and do by ourselves … theoretically, you could, but the problem is that all the gases and water and oil that is under the ground is actually highly pressurized … and takes a tremendous amount of technical knowledge."