IVRY-SUR-SEINE, France (AP) _ A stone's throw from the Seine River, the bit of a drill under a towering white derrick bores a hole under suburban Paris in search of oil that might one day be dubbed Paris Crude. ``Normally, I do the North Sea,'' drilling superviser Lars Froybu said Wednesday during a tour of the site. ``This is quite different. ``There, you are in the sea and live on a rig for 24 hours a day. Here, 10 minutes away you can find lots of good restaurants. You're drilling in civilization.'' Societe Nationale Elf Aquitaine, a state-owned oil company, started sinking the exploratory well at Ivry, on the southern edge of Paris, Tuesday. It is the first of several such wells planned under the Paris-Ile de France permit, which covers Paris and its northern, eastern and southern suburbs. The permit was awarded in December 1985 to Elf, Total Compagnie Francaises des Petroles, and British Petroleum after competition reached a pinnacle in the search for oil in the Paris Basin, 50,000 square miles stretching east from Paris to the West German border. For years there have been rumblings that the City of Light itself might be sitting on crude, a theory that provoked smiles, cute headlines and gags about industrializing the Eiffel Tower. Oil companies are less fanciful. The Elf-Total-BP association already has spent $11.6 million on its permit, most of it for seismic tests, according to the chief of Elf's French operations, Bruno Weymuller. The Paris Basin contains 40 million tons of known oil reserves, 48 operating wells and about 600 exploratory wells. With a discovery rate of 1 in 12 wells, compared to the 1 in 20 average, the Basin is increasingly drawing foreign oil companies, although oil executives concede it will never be Houston. But ``no one dared go into this area before,'' Louis Prudhomme, Elf's assistant director of French operations, said of the region. About 10 million people live in the 587 square miles covered by the permit, and Elf is making a special effort to be discreet, at least as discreet as one can be with a 165-foot oil derrick operating round-the-clock. Motors powering the drill are kept in sheds beside the derrick. A wall to cut noise was erected to help shield residents of an apartment block across the street. A special phone line was installed to receive complaints. ``We've tried to protect the environment to a maximum,'' said Prudhomme. Ivry, on the left bank of the Seine, is one of several sites considered promising on the basis of seismic tests. The objective of the Ivry drilling is in fact about a half-mile from the derrick, on the right bank of the Seine. That means the bit grinding its way 2,000 yards into the earth must follow a deviated course, complicating drilling, officials said. By Wednesday morning, a hole 2,067 foot deep had been bored, the drilling superviser said. The operation is to be completed in about three weeks. A positive find would mean boring ``appreciation'' wells nearby to determine the size of the oil deposit, according to Elf officials. Total has said it plans to start drilling before the end of the year. Limited seismic tests of the capital, made two years ago, revealed that the center of Paris was ``not a geological priority,'' Elf officials said. ``Is there oil under Paris? We will only know when we've drilled. That is the moment of truth.'' Prudhomme said. ``We've already staked out forage sites if one day we have to work in Paris.'' A derrick could be erected at a stadium or in an unused train station or abandoned apartment buildings, according to officials who do not rule out rigging a derrick on a boat on the Seine. No one in France stands to get rich overnight by owning land on a drilling site. The property owner receives a modest ``rent'' from the oil company, but the state controls mineral rights. Parisians, easily moved to protest, remain placid in the face of the Ivry drilling. ``If they put a gas pump on my route and lower the price, that's all I care about,'' said Jean-Louis Ribolla, a waiter near the Champs Elysees. ``Finding oil in the Place de la Concorde would be quite refined,'' he added, winking.
