Thirty years ago, people couldnt believe it: The old man’s elixir boosted crops, ate up sewage, and made the desert bloom. Today half a dozen Texas companies claim the elixir does all that and a whole lot more.
Why does a rich Houston investment banker spend his days traveling the globe, preaching to the uninformed and indifferent that the world’s supply of crude oil is in steep decline and the end of life as we know it is very, very near? Maybe because it is.
The inside story of Boone Pickens’ adventures in the Wall Street merger game, featuring action, suspense, drama, a few laughs, and a special guest appearance by President Ronald Reagan.
After James and Linda Rowe were killed in a grisly refinery explosion in Texas City in 2005, their wild-child daughter could have taken a modest settlement and started to rebuild her life in a small Louisiana border town. Instead, she chose to fight—and brought a multibillion-dollar oil company to its
A Disney cruise set sail from Galveston under new a deal that is “guaranteed to create a minimum of $2.4 million in gross revenue for the Port of Galveston.”
Blockbuster shuts down one-third of its locations, international business out of Texas goes gangbusters, and home prices increase in San Antonio and Houston.
As hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. fracking) has unlocked untold reserves of natural gas, it has also unleashed a wave of concerns about pollution and, for one family in the Barnett Shale, a long nightmare.
From the old-style models to the three-story turbines, windmills are a part of Texas history. The machine's evolution is on display in Lubbock at the world's largest windmill museum.
The unlikely story of how a handful of dreamers, schemers, and (all too often) failures made oil-and-gas-rich Texas the leading wind power state in the country.
Amid all the drink tickets, bikini-clad hostesses, and outrageous displays of wealth at the world’s largest expo for independent oilmen, I was determined to get some answers about the future of the business.
On October 27, 1900, an Austrian-born mining engineer named Anthony F. Lucas spudded in an oil well on a hill near Beaumont. He’d drilled a previous well in the vicinity to a depth of 575 feet before running out of money and giving up, but this time he’d secured financing
Our most iconic oil and gas man, lately a water marauder and now a celebrated windcatter, has saved himself a couple of times in his eighty glorious years. Who’s to say he can’t save America?
Wayland grew up in Midland and has worked in the oil industry for nearly a decade. He is now a mud engineer for Baker Hughes Drilling Fluids in Victoria.When I was growing up in Midland, I didn’t want anything to do with the oil field. In junior high, you learn
Facing an energy crisis, Texas is on the verge of a solution that will belch about five billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the next forty years. Breathe deeply—while you still can.
The Houston-based energy giant put the pursuit of profits ahead of all other corporate goals, which fostered a climate of workaholism and paranoia. And that was only part of the problem.
The biggest economic news in Texas is the merging of the electric and natural-gas utility industries in anticipation of the coming deregulation of electricity. Huge deals are in the works: Houston Industries, the parent of Houston Lighting and Power, is acquiring Houston-based NorAm, the nation’s third-largest gas utility; and Texas
The state’s big investor-owned utilities, aptly nicknamed IOUs, are in big trouble—and Wall Street knows it. Historically, the IOUs have been able to block damaging legislation calling for the deregulation of electricity and immediate rate cuts, but the once-friendly Public Utility Commission has turned against them. In a sweeping and
It’s not enough to say that associate editor Helen Thorpe was a fish out of water while reporting her story on the new oil plays in the Gulf of Mexico (“Oil and Water,”). She was really a fish out of water on the water. Three different times, the
There’s black gold in the South American rain forest—lots of it. Can the oil companies get it out without ruining the jungle and the way of life of the Indians who live there? The perils of drilling in the heart of darkness.
Ten years ago I guess you could call yourself a Texan if you hadn’t been to the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, but an easy conversance with the OTC and its ways certainly bolstered your credentials. Back then the OTC was, like riding a horse or drinking a beer in
