Our new 10-part series takes you inside the rugged Permian Basin of West Texas, where roughnecks and billionaire wildcatters are fueling a boom so big it’s reshaping our climate, our economy, and our geopolitics.
Oil
Though some will reap serious profits, the region's dealing with skyrocketing rents, overcrowded schools, and potholes as big as VW Beetles.
The film debuts at the Dallas International Film Festival this weekend.
A recent spate of closures of the iconic restaurant chain has left many communities in the lurch.
The energy secretary outlined the Trump administration’s new direction at an oil and gas conference in Houston.
The number of spills in 2016 was the lowest Texas had seen since 2012.
Start your summer vacations early, if you can.
Don’t be fooled by claims of economic diversification—the city still runs on oil.
Let’s not overreact, but let’s not underreact either.
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.
Texas is much less vulnerable to an oil bust than it once was, or than one might think.
Denton's fracking ban is facing constitutional challenges, but other parts of the state are keen to enforce laws of their own against fracking.
Residents in the more upscale half of the Permian Basin make more money per capita than people in New York, San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston.
Taxpayers, who footed a large chunk of the bill for the new $1.2 billion Cowboys Stadium, got a raw deal, according to a new story in Bloomberg Businessweek.
The new $8 billion project will be fed in part with natural gas from the South Texas and Eagle Ford Shale fields.
Is TNT's reboot of the classic soap opera also a mirror of the country's changing relationship with fossil fuels?
The powerful state agency is tasked with regulating oil, gas and other energy—not trains. Its own commissioners favor a new name: the Texas Energy Resources Commission.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott scored a victory over the EPA this week over when a federal appeals court ordered the federal agency to take more time to consider Texas's pollution control measures.
Apple nearly nudges Exxon out of the top spot for most valuable company, JC Penney unveils a new logo, and H-E-B tries to buy its .xxx domain name.
The author of Private Empire: ExxonMobile and American Power answers the question: In terms of difficulty, how would you compare reporting on Exxon with the reporting you did for your previous book, The Bin Ladens?
How the world’s largest corporation decides who will make it too the top—and who won’t.
In 1996 a powerful South Texas ranching clan accused ExxonMobil of sabotaging wells on the family’s property. Thirteen years, millions of dollars in legal fees, and one state Supreme Court opinion later, the biggest oil field feud of its time is still raging.
The New Yorker writer talks about his latest book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.
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.
The spill in the Gulf is just the latest in a string of catastrophic regulatory failures that prove how incompetent government is. And how important it is.
The BP oil spill hit the small world of Houston’s oil and gas business hard. So now that the well is plugged, who’s up and who’s down?
Skip Hollandsworth talks about rigs, the trickle-down effect, and the new generation of oilmen.
Midland’s energy companies are still laying people off a decade after the bottom of the bust. But—surprise—the city’s economy is booming again.
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.
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 knees.
Offshore drillers are finding mammoth reservoirs in places that were once considered barren, which is why the Gulf of Mexico is booming again.
Should nonproducing oil rigs be demolished, or are the habitats marine life have built around them too valuable to compromise?
If oil and gas drilling is considered "manufacturing" instead of "mining," the industry effectively receives a huge tax exemption.
The Republican congressman from Tyler says an oil pipeline radiates heat, making it a popular "date" destination for caribou.
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…
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…
Texas Monthly talks with two online energy experts concerning peak oil and the future of energy demand.
The first commandment of fiction writing is: Show, don’t tell. Rick Bass knows it well, though he still struggled through many drafts before finishing his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be (Houghton Mifflin, $25), which will be published this month. “Paint the images and trust the readers to…
No one will admit we’re in the middle of one, even as the economy surges. How come? Because the last time we had it this good, bragging only hastened the arrival of another four-letter word: “bust.”
Since the day Stanley Marsh 3 finally went too far and locked up George Whittenburg’s son in a chicken coop, all of Amarillo has been abuzz about the bizarre battle between these intractable foes.