In the first episode of our new podcast series, host Christian Wallace takes us back to his hometown in the Permian Basin, which is nearly unrecognizable to him today. We meet a few of the people whose lives have been upended by the biggest oil boom in U.S. history.
We recommend this gripping piece on the boom-and-bust cycle for your weekend longread.
Growing up in the Permian Basin, I thought I had a sense of what it was like working the oilfields. Turns out I didn’t know a damn thing.
Plummeting prices. Industry layoffs. Panicked mergers. Are we about to experience the eighties all over again?
I thought being a landman in the Eagle Ford Shale would help replenish my bank account. I quickly got more than I bargained for.
We asked three experts in the oil field to come together to discuss that very question and to debate whether this latest boom will treat Texas, and the nation, any better than the last two.
George Mitchell didn’t set out to launch one of the biggest oil and gas rushes in world history—he just wanted to coax some more gas out of an old well near Fort Worth.
A son of the oil patch chases the new boom in South Texas.
In November 1973, Texas Monthly, which was still in its first year of existence, marked the tenth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy with a profile of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite; the cover, however, went to Tom Landry. Two years later, in November 1975, the…
Forget the Outer Continental Shelf. There’s a good old-fashioned boom happening in Midland, thanks to a crafty drilling technique that unlocked the secret reserves of the Permian Basin and revived the late, great West Texas oilman.
Skip Hollandsworth talks about rigs, the trickle-down effect, and the new generation of oilmen.
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…
Don’t give up on oil yet, Texas. Come along to Pearsall, deep in the brush country, and learn how the new oil boom is different from the old.
