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Oil Price Anxiety Forecast: Mild Consternation
Last year, readers may recall, there was a fair amount of anxiety among Texans, and a fair amount of gloomy prophesying about Texas, as a result of a plunge in oil prices that had left the price per...
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Houston’s Real Estate Market Feeling The Effects Of Oil’s Price Drop
They said it’d be different this time, but it appears that Houston real estate is at a tipping point. The oil price crash is just beginning to be felt in the market, which has until recently proven...
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Learning to Roughneck
If you climb the concrete stairs to the top of Mustang Stadium, one of the highest points in Andrews, Texas, and look in nearly any direction, past the parking lot and asphalt loop surrounding the...
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Gas Prices Are at a Twelve-Year Low Throughout Texas, But Don’t Count on it...
The headlines out of Houston are mostly doom and gloom as oil prices continue their downward trend—as of Wednesday, it’s below $45 a barrel. That has implications for the short-term health of the...
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Oil Theft is Increasing in West Texas
The fall of oil has been wildly exaggerated, but the boom times in West Texas have brought a challenge that people outside of the fields probably haven’t given much thought to: the problem of oil...
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The Number Of Oil Spills in Texas Dropped 26 Percent in 2016
In 2016, the daily average oil production in Texas was near the highest rate it had been since the late seventies. There were nearly 179,000 wells producing a daily average of 2,663 Mbbls a day. Things...
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Rick Perry Delivers the Gospel of ‘Energy Realism’
In a campaign-style speech at an energy conference in Houston on Wednesday, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry announced a national energy policy that he dubbed “the new energy realism.” The tenets of this...
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A Farewell to Dairy Queens
On a recent Thursday afternoon, the front lawns of Lockney, a South Plains farming town of fewer than two thousand, were still dusted with the windblown residue of the cotton harvest. Main Street was...
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Watch a Clip From ‘The Iron Orchard’ Before Its Premiere
Six decades after its publication, The Iron Orchard will finally have its day at the movies. The cinematic adaptation of Edmund Van Zandt’s novel, which we wrote about in our January issue, will...
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The Permian Basin Is Booming With Oil. But at What Cost to West Texans?
The horizon was thick with iron derricks. All around us, pumpjacks were scattered across the muddy fields like an army of giant iron grasshoppers. They bowed their bulky heads and lifted rich...
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Announcing ‘Boomtown,’ a New Podcast on the Greatest Oil Boom in History
Over the past few years, the West Texas region known as the Permian Basin has become the most productive oil field in the country. By some measures, it’s the biggest in the entire world. When...
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For a While This Week, Oil Was Cheaper Than Dirt. Should We Be Worried?
Wars have been fought over oil, but for a few hours Monday afternoon, West Texas Intermediate crude was one of the most unwanted commodities on earth. Prices for May delivery of a barrel of “Texas Tea”...
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ExxonMobil’s Failure to Go Green Could Worsen Its Financial Future
In 1999, Enron CEO Jeff Skilling mocked ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil and gas company, calling it a “dinosaur.” Yet Exxon lumbered on, churning out steady profits, even after Enron collapsed in...
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How the Most Hyped U.S. Oil Merger in a Decade Went Bust
It was the kind of clear, crisp spring day that made people happy they lived in Houston—azaleas in bloom, the landscape aswirl in pink and coral and scarlet. Vicki Hollub, the CEO of Occidental...
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Can Biden Really Be Any Worse for the Oil Patch Than Trump?
President Joe Biden took his oath of office just before 11 a.m. on January 20. By 11:15 that day, I’d received my first email decrying the forthcoming death of America’s energy industry. A few minutes...
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Can the ‘Texas Miracle’ Survive?
On an average day in 2019, the Texas Workforce Commission received about 13,000 calls from Texans applying for unemployment benefits. Toward the end of the year the state unemployment rate hovered...
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Houston Is Not Prepared for the Oil Bust
Houston has survived its share of floods and hurricanes recently, but are we ready for the economic Big One? As I write, the self-proclaimed energy capital of the world is being hammered by twin...
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Boomtown
In a rugged corner of West Texas, billionaire wildcatters and roughnecks are fueling an oil boom so big it’s reshaping our climate, our economy, and our geopolitics. Boomtown is a 10-part podcast...
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Listen to the First Episode of Boomtown: “Highway to Hell”
Few places stoke the imagination like West Texas. It’s a land of mesquite-studded prairies, drifting tumbleweeds, and wide-open vistas. It’s also home to America’s most productive oil field, the...
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T. Boone Pickens Was a Helluva Storyteller—and That’s Why We Couldn’t Resist Him
In 2008, when I got the chance to meet T. Boone Pickens for the first time—he had just turned eighty and was on a crusade to build wind-energy farms and get Americans into natural-gas-fueled cars—I was...
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A New Pipeline Through the Hill Country Is Pitting the Oil Industry Against...
On the day of the explosion, Randy Zgabay’s grandmother kept him inside. His grandfather would usually hold Randy, who was only eighteen months old, while his seven-year-old-sister, Laura, played in...
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Why One Expert Predicts a Major Hurricane Hitting Houston Would Be “America’s...
The storm emerges over the eastern Atlantic in late August, first as a slow-moving tropical system that remains largely unnoticed in faraway Texas. It gains power as it drifts westward into warmer...
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The Great Burkburnett Football Field Feud of 1972
How’s this for trash talk: weeks before Burkburnett High’s Bulldogs began practicing for their 1972 football opener, a 78-year-old resident of nearby Wichita Falls marched onto their field, planted a...
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It’s Hard Out Here—Way, Way, Way Out Here—for a Medic
The emergency alarm went off just before sundown. For the oil-field medics of Loving County, that sound means your world is about to get a shot of adrenaline. One minute you might be lounging on the...
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The Dead Sea of West Texas
About twenty-five miles north of Fort Stockton sits what looks, at first blush, like an oasis amid the West Texas desert. When I recently visited what might be Texas’s newest sizable body of water, its...
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