Reporting and commentary on the Texas energy industry and innovations shaping its future
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
Buying into energy efficiency, one electric bill at a time.
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
Executive editor S. C. Gwynne on researching the energy industry and writing about coal plants.
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 record’s clean. I’m sure that I haven’t done everything that everyone would like me to do. But I’ve never hurt anybody.”
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.
Six months after the merger of Exxon and Mobil, a tally of the winners and losers.
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
Why electricity is a supercharged political issue. Plus: Who cares about the Democrats running for U.S. Senate?
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 31-year-old,
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
My father loved his job at a Gulf Coast oil refinery. In fact, he loved it to death.
“Guys like me like Iraq,” says Houston oilman Oscar Wyatt. “That’s the way the real world works, baby.”
A lot stronger and more hospitable than barbed wire, this is one of those good fences that make good neighbors.
Judges take his money. Juries buy his bull. And when clients like Pennzoil need a tiger in their tank, they hire Joe Jamail.
At first, Hughes Tool used the count to plan its own future. Now an entire industry uses it to plan theirs.
From his early days in Big Spring, Eugene Anderson wasn’t what he seemed; neither was the mysterious element he later claimed turned water into fuel.
Ed Jones rode the oil boom to a white-collar job. It was a short trip.
Don’t give up! There’s still money to be made finding oil. Up in Graham the Creswells are striking it rich with the help of Jesus and, er, creekology.
The quintessential wildcatter fills you in on free enterprise and Texas after oil.
Jack Young was the eighties’ oil boom in the flesh. Unfortunately, he also personifies the aftermath of the bust.
West Texas was a desert when this little irrigation device came along. Now it’s a desert that produces more cotton than anywhere else in the country.
Ranger was the most romantic field in the early oil boom. Now a major company is risking its future to prove that romance still lives.
The glory days of the oil industry aren’t over; they’ve only just begun.
How the world’s largest corporation decides who will make it too the top—and who won’t.
When Dad Joiner signed away all his oil leases to H.L. Hunt, all the cards weren’t on the table. Some were still underground.
A strip-mining company made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
A new method of oil recovery means more energy, more wealth, and . . . death.
Here’s the plot for the legislature’s 140-day run, opening soon.
Can Texas still make it as a nation? Can Dolph Briscoe make it as a sheik?
Of doodlebugs, boll weevils, rockhounds, and wildcatters.
The energy crisis has caused a crisis of nerves for the Chicken Littles of Wall Street.
