I've struck oil

The insistent shrill of the mobile phone in the wee hours was an abrupt and unwelcome start to the day for Bill Gammell. For goodness' sake, who could be ringing the former Scotland rugby winger at his Edinburgh home at such an ungodly hour?

Perhaps it was Gammell's close boyhood friend, a certain George W. Bush, President of the United States? Or maybe it was his old schoolfriend, Tony Blair?

In fact, the chief executive of Cairn Energy was woken last Thursday by his ecstatic oil exploration director, who had himself been woken at 4.30am by a call from India. The sleepy Gammell must have struggled to take in what Michael Watts was saying.

In a nutshell, the message was: 'We've struck oil - big time.' I was incredulous,' recalls the brawny Gammell, still fit at 51. 'The data was better than we could have dreamed.'

At a stroke, the reserves of Cairn Energy, Britain's biggest pure oil and gas exploration company, had doubled. It is now likely that the find will rank as one of the biggest in the world this year.

Gammell, already a millionaire many times over, made a paper profit of £1.6 million when Cairn shares jumped 57% on the news. The value of his holdings in the company he created rose to £4.9 million.

Over-excited energy analysts described the £200 million oil strike in the Indian desert state of Rajasthan as 'transformational'. By conservative estimates, the find could double Cairn's present reserves of about 120 million barrels of oil.

Certainly, Cairn Energy has been transformed overnight into one of Scotland's biggest companies, worth £869 million. The Indian strike could result in the doubling of Cairn's daily production to 60,000 barrels of oil a day. But Gammell is confident there is more good news to come.

'We should know in a few months, and for the moment I cannot say anything,' he says. 'But if you strike oil, the odds of finding more nearby rise rapidly. We now have the potential to find 100 million-barrel fields in the Indian subcontinent and the resources to exploit them. We are very profitable and we have no debt.'

What is clear is that the find was a huge piece of luck. Shell, had it been more quick-witted and less lumbering, would be the company now celebrating.

Only a few years ago, the oil giant had the 5,000 square kilometre plot, which it sold in tranches to Cairn. The latest changed hands for just £4 million.

'I am not criticising Shell,' says Gammell. 'The first few drillings were not promising, but we just had a vision that there was oil there.'

Famous in the company for his openness and modesty, Gammell employs an apt rugby metaphor: 'I get passed the ball and take it over the line, but somebody else has done the work. This is a team thing, it's not just down to me.

'There is a small squeezy rugby ball in this office on which is written ''Pick up the ball and run with it''. That is what has happened here. At Cairn we talk about taking brave pills. Our motto is bravery, boldness and self-belief.'

Gammell was fortunate to be brought up with the broadest of silver spoons in his mouth. His father, Jimmy, once chairman of pukka fund manager Ivory & Sime, made it big in the oil business by helping George Bush senior to start up in business in the Fifties.

The former president liked his business chum so much that he sent son George W, then 13, to the Gammells' farm in Perthshire to get to know Scotland. The families grew close through a series of exchange visits. George W even attended Gammell's wedding in Glasgow 20 years ago.

And, of course, it does Gammell no harm at all to have as another chum Tony Blair, who was in his class at Fettes, the Edinburgh public school known as the Scottish Eton.

It is no secret that President Bush's first words to Blair after he came to office in 2001 were: 'I believe you know my old friend Bill Gammell.'

But for all his big wheel contacts, his achievements are his own. His friendship with Bush did not make him a dashing Scottish international who won five caps in the late Seventies.

And knowing Blair did not give him the luck and skill he needed to strike oil in the Indian desert.