The Permian Basin Is Booming With Oil. But at What Cost to West Texans?

In January 2015, the price of oil sank to $44 a barrel, less than half of what it had been a year before. It seemed as if the mighty shale boom had fizzled out. Purse strings across West Texas tightened, and by December 2016 more than one hundred American oil and gas companies, almost half of them based in Texas, had filed for bankruptcy. Some workers who had come to the region seeking their fortune ended up abandoning their vehicles at the Midland airport before they boarded flights back home. It seemed as if the Permian Basin had seen its last big hurrah. Then something happened that hadn’t been seen in the region’s long history of boom-and-bust cycles.

Despite relatively deflated oil prices, drilling in the Permian began to pick back up. Technological improvements were one reason; fracking and horizontal drilling became more efficient. Today, some experts estimate that oil could drop to as low as $33 per barrel and sinking new wells in the Permian would still be profitable, a scenario that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Another factor was the end of a forty-year embargo on crude exports, signed by President Obama in December 2015. Permian production has since rocketed from two million barrels a day in 2016 to four million in March of this year. Over the next four years, industry experts expect the output to double again.

The Permian now has a legitimate claim to being the world’s most productive oil field, outpacing even the Ghawar Field, in Saudi Arabia. As a result, America has neared its long-sought goal of energy independence. Last November marked the first time in 75 years that the country exported more crude oil and other petroleum liquids than it imported, a milestone that’s been lauded by officials from Austin to Washington, D.C. In April, Vice President Mike Pence toured a drilling rig outside Midland and told the small crowd, outfitted in hard hats, “Thank you for setting the pace for American energy dominance.”

The benefit of this boom to actual West Texans, however, is less clear. As I crisscrossed the Permian recently, I heard the same concerns echoed over and over again, at my family’s dining room table, in the halls of county courthouses, at backyard barbecues, and in cafes across the region.

Booms are, by definition, explosive—a sudden blast of activity that can take a community by surprise. Even in the Permian Basin, which has weathered these cycles for nearly a century, a boom of this magnitude is impossible to prepare for. And while it has brought opportunity, it has posed serious challenges. Whether the rewards outweigh the repercussions . . . well, that depends on who you ask.

Most West Texans are grateful for the recent uptick—making a good living in the dusty Permian has never been easy—but even so, locals are faced with a host of new concerns. For one, the cost of living has inflated so quickly that, for many residents, it has outpaced the gains. Those without jobs in the oil patch are especially hard-hit, and industries outside the oil field face severe staffing shortages: Dumpsters overflow without garbage truck drivers to empty them. Students are late to class because there aren’t enough bus drivers to pick them up. Law enforcement is stretched thin while crime rates—drug use, sex trafficking, theft—rise along with the influx of temporary laborers. Hospitals are short on physicians. Schools can’t keep enough teachers in their classrooms.

And there are other very real concerns: driving on the highways alongside gigantic tankers and equipment haulers can feel like a suicide mission. Even some of those who are fiercely pro-oil have grown worried about the strain on the region’s limited natural resources—especially water—and the environmental toll of the proliferation of sand mining, the flares burning methane and benzene, and all the trash that litters the region.

Though Texas and the U.S. will reap serious profits from the sweat poured into the Permian, what lasting benefit will the region have to show for all of this when the boom ends?

Shawna Granado was born and raised in Odessa. She was nineteen when she took a job as a waitress at the Pioneer Cafe, a tin shack planted on a desolate stretch of highway some 25 miles northwest of the city. Despite its remote location, everyone who spent time in that part of the patch (mostly men working on wells or at the nearby compressor station) knew the Pioneer Cafe at Turnbaugh Corner. The T-junction got its name from “Ma” Turnbaugh, who opened the Pioneer in 1937 and lived for years in a one-room house behind it. The restaurant was never much to look at, but it was the only place serving hot meals and cold beer for miles. When Ma died, in 1969, one of the waitresses took over the business. Eventually that woman passed it down to one of her longtime servers, and so it went for years until Shawna, having worked there for nearly a decade, continued the tradition and bought out the business with her parents in 2010.

“We were booming when I bought it,” she told me as we sat at a Mexican joint in Odessa, her arms decorated with bright tattoos and her hair dyed a vibrant shade of red. At 6 a.m., when the Pioneer opened, the day crews came in hungry for breakfast, while the graveyard “tower” (a West Texas bastardization of “tour”) stumbled in after their overnight shift. “You can’t legally sell alcohol until 7 a.m. in Texas,” Shawna said, “so the guys would literally sit there and watch the clock. Come 7:45, you’d think there was a party rockin’ and rollin’ in there. Some guys would just be barely waking up, eating their eggs. And others are knocking back a twelve-pack.”

I witnessed a few of these early mornings during my tour in the patch in 2013. Anytime I had work in the area, I’d go out of my way to stop at the Pioneer, sometimes for a bite and other times just to sit with a mug of coffee, dwelling in the atmosphere of the place. There was always a group of men darkened by the sun plowing through plates of smothered burritos, chili, hash browns, or chicken-fry.

The 2014 oil downturn abruptly deflated the cafe’s bustling business, but Shawna held on. The Pioneer had weathered busts for nearly eight decades, and she wasn’t going to let it fail on her watch. One by one she had to lay off her staff; eventually she had to let her own sister go. It came down to just Shawna and the cook. Shawna began to eat through her savings. “I don’t think I paid myself for the last eight months,” she said. “I made dinner to take home to my family every day. That was one way of surviving, paying myself with food.” In April 2017 the Pioneer Cafe turned eighty years old. Shawna celebrated the milestone by hosting a party at the cafe. The few regulars who were still around came out to reminisce about the late-night jam sessions, the countless card games, and that one time patrons kept tossing back beers while a tornado touched down just outside. (“I guess we’ll all go down together—or up,” Shawna told them.) Six months later, she locked the doors to the Pioneer for the last time.

Shawna, who’s now 36 and married with a 12-year-old son, is working as a waitress again, at a little cafe outside Midland that serves home-cooked meals. She enjoys seeing some of her old customers who are back to work now. She’s glad that things have picked back up, but she’s also well aware of the negative repercussions.

“The price of living is outrageous,” she said. “Luckily, we own our house, but I have friends who don’t. I’ve got one friend who’s making, like, twenty-something dollars an hour and struggling, not knowing how he’s going to pay for a one-bedroom apartment.” Practically everyone in the Permian knows someone in a similar situation. In March of this year, the website Apartment List reported that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Odessa was $1,267—higher than in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas. And it’s not just rent that’s gone up; groceries and other basic goods have spiked as well. Ironically, a gallon of gas is more expensive in the Permian Basin than at pumps in other parts of the state. “I don’t necessarily see how it balances out,” Shawna said. “People are out there busting their ass and risking their lives on the oil rigs. And, yeah, they’re banking, but unless they’re living in a man camp, they’re just breaking even. It’s all for nothing.”

Like so many West Texans, myself included, Shawna is proud to be from this scrubby, stinky patch of oil-rich dirt. But the whiplash of boom and bust takes its toll. “I feel like everyone’s goal—I mean everyone born and raised here—is to get out of this town,” she said. The latest boom has transformed Odessa into something she doesn’t recognize, with its clogged roads and rising drug abuse. “We’re a small town with big-city problems now,” she said. Shawna and her husband have considered leaving the Permian. He’s thinking about San Antonio. She’s leaning toward Austin. 

One Friday night a few days after the Oil Show, I drove over to watch the Odessa High Bronchos—the lesser-known sibling of the Permian High Panthers (of Friday Night Lights fame)—take on the Midland Lee Rebels. It was a weird sensation, driving up to Ratliff Stadium, on the outskirts of Odessa. The last time I had been there, I was suited up on the field. That was more than a decade ago. Driving through the parking lot, the long-touted stereotype about Midland being the wealthy white-collar town and Odessa its working-class counterpoint held true: brand-new SUVs filled the Midland side, while Odessa’s half was marked by older work trucks with pipe racks welded to their sides.

Like many school districts across the Permian Basin, those in Midland and Odessa have struggled to address staff shortages and record-breaking enrollment brought on by the boom. Odessa’s Ector ISD, for example, started the school year with 240 vacant positions. One educator was left with the unenviable mission of teaching precalculus to 63 high schoolers in a single classroom. Permian High, built to accommodate some 2,500 kids, has a current enrollment of 3,600 students and is expected to add hundreds more in the next few years. Some classrooms don’t have enough desks and chairs. One English teacher resorted to buying Home Depot buckets for her students to sit on. Poor test scores have pushed Region 18, which includes most of the Permian Basin, to the bottom of the state rankings. And while teachers leave for higher-paying jobs in the oil field or abandon the patch for more affordable cities, the districts struggle to recruit replacements. Both Ector and Midland ISDs have considered adding virtual classes.

Public schools in Texas get most of their revenue from property taxes, and during a boom, property values tend to increase exponentially—in Midland, average home prices rose by $50,000 from 2017 to 2018. But thanks to the state’s recapture policy (popularly known as Robin Hood), the windfall doesn’t necessarily benefit local schools. This year, Andrews ISD, which serves my home county of 18,000, sent more than $12 million to Austin to be redistributed to other schools.

Yet during the game, these concerns seemed to be on hold. One of the Midland Lee players chased his father’s legacy on the turf. From the bleachers, parents hollered at their boys, “Hit ’em hard, mijo!” The air was cool and smelled of Frito pie. I went to the concession stand at the half for coffee. The cashier handed me a Styrofoam cup with the name of a local oil field company stamped on the side. I remember hearing in high school that Southlake Carroll High, north of Fort Worth, would be serving sushi in its new multimillion-dollar stadium. At the time I’d never seen sushi. There were some folks, including Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, who decried the new concession as a sign that Texas high school football had “gone soft.” That was one thing we never had to worry about in West Texas.

In the second half, the Bronchos, nearly always the underdogs in their area matchups, started to fall behind. As the score grew more lopsided late in the third quarter, I decided to file out with some of the dejected Odessa fans. I took one more look at the dark prairies surrounding us from the top of the stadium. Not too far off were tall towers of light, each one shining like some kind of holy pillar—drilling rigs. Out there I knew there were roughnecks working for the money that had built this stadium, that had paid for the logo on my Styrofoam cup. And out there somewhere was a father missing the game.

According to public records, there are three bodies buried in Loving County. About an hour’s drive west of Odessa, Loving County is 673 square miles of desert sand, home to 106 full-time residents and 1,059 producing oil wells. Despite its wealth of oil, Loving has long held the title of least-populated county in the contiguous United States. There’s no grocery store, hospital, bank, beauty salon, honky-tonk, church, school, or movie theater—not even a cemetery. Historically, if someone died in Loving County, they were likely to be interred in Pecos or Kermit, either an eighty- or one-hundred-mile round-trip for the funeral attendees. That changed recently when one local family, the Carrs, carved out a portion of their land to use as a graveyard.

“My dad is ninety-one,” Mozelle Carr, who’s 62, told me one October morning. “He picked out a gravesite on his land, and we had it surveyed and sectioned off. It’s in the form of a wagon wheel. My mom and dad are the hub, and there are five children, so we each have a spoke, and then we have one for friends and family. We don’t have anybody but my sister-in-law up there right now.”

Mozelle has lived in Loving County most of her life. She speaks in the slow, deliberate drawl of rural West Texans, stretching words like “right” into two syllables. As the county clerk, she spends most of her weekdays at the yellow-brick courthouse in Mentone (population 23), the county seat and only semblance of a town in Loving County. The interior of the two-story courthouse—by far the biggest structure in the county—was redone during an oil boom in the seventies, and for forty years the dark pecan paneling and white Georgian marble has stood as the most lavish expression of prosperity in the area. Now the oil fields of Loving County are filled once again with rigs and roughnecks, and from her perch in the courthouse at the center of town, Mozelle watches the transformative power of the boom.

“Nothing like this has ever happened,” Mozelle told me as we sat in her office. The first signs of the fracking boom appeared in Loving County in 2011. Mozelle wasn’t the clerk then, but she heard about the long line of landmen (workers who secure leases for oil companies) who crammed into the courthouse, waiting their turn to access the county’s property files. In January of this year, Loving was the third most productive county in Texas, with more than six million barrels of oil sucked from the earth that month. Several food trailers have opened up around the courthouse that serve tacos and burgers and Cuban cuisine. There’s also a newly constructed convenience store. A sticker on the door informs patrons that their beer “is colder than a witches [sic] tit in a brass bra.” Inside, the sunglasses and most of the other merchandise is covered in a fine layer of dust, and the coffee, thick as mud, is always free.

The boom has drawn thousands of out-of-towners to work the rigs and build the infrastructure (pipelines and electric lines) needed to get all that crude to market. Companies had to scramble to build workforce housing (better known as “man camps”) to accommodate their workers. Two of these complexes sprang up just outside Mentone. Eight hundred men bunk at one camp, while another 530 reside at the other. Mozelle, who could once name almost every man, woman, and child in the county, marvels at the number of strangers who now, at least temporarily, live on her doorstep.

In addition to the itinerant residents, some 20,000 vehicles are coming and going through Loving every day, most of them driving on the three main roads that crisscross the county. “Nobody’s ever seen this much traffic,” Mozelle said, gesturing out the window. “If you look around the courthouse, several of our streetlights have been knocked down. None of the signs are up anymore. They hit the light pole across the street at the annex.” On one occasion, she had to run out of the courthouse to flag down a truck driver who had sideswiped an RV.

Those who perform the most perilous tasks demanded of oil field hands will often say they consider driving to and from work to be the most dangerous part of the job. Even if you don’t make a living by risking your life in the patch, you still have to drive on the roads.

Virtually none of the state highways and county roads snaking through the Permian were built to withstand the high volume of trucks (a single frack job can require 1,200 truckloads of sand, water, and equipment) or the weight of their cargo (one truck might be hauling 24 tons of frack sand). As the boom continues, the roads deteriorate. Potholes the size of VW Beetles are not uncommon. Neither are blowouts. Mozelle, frustrated by the mounting problems and lack of help, told me she feels that the state treats her county “like a stepchild.”

She’s not alone. West Texans often grumble about how roads in the capital (and even Lubbock) are more likely to get fixed than their highways. Brooks Landgraf, a state representative from Odessa, is the vice chair of the Transportation Committee and has worked to secure more funding for the region’s roads. To sway some of his fellow legislators, he’s resorted to flying them to the Permian to see the critical state of the roads firsthand. But it’s a tough sell. One senior research engineer at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute said that upgrading the rural farm-to-market roads in West Texas to withstand the weight and volume of the traffic would cost between $500,000 and $1 million per mile.

And there are few other means by which to raise local revenue to solve Loving’s problems. With no hotels in the county, it can’t capitalize on the hotel occupancy tax. And with only a single convenience store hawking ice and beer, the community isn’t exactly raking in funds from sales tax either. The same is true for smaller communities across West Texas.

No stretch of Permian asphalt is more notorious than U.S. 285, or as West Texans call it, Death Highway. The day before my visit to Loving County, I had taken 285 north out of Pecos toward the drilling frenzy happening around the ghost town of Orla, near the New Mexico state line. The procession of trucks and big rigs that dwarfed my 1500 GMC pickup grunted its way to Orla bumper-to-bumper, coughing black exhaust and stirring up clouds of caliche dust so thick I had to turn on my wipers. About halfway there, a welder’s truck flew past me and something—a metal rod, best I could tell—came off the truck and struck my windshield, cracking it in half.

In Loving County, the total number of crashes jumped from 18 in 2016 to 103 last year, while down the road Ector County (Odessa) reported more than 5,000 wrecks, nearly double the amount from two years before. Since 2016, crashes in the Permian Basin are up 67 percent and fatalities have increased 97 percent. According to TxDOT data, although the region constitutes only 1.6 percent of the state’s population, it’s responsible for 12 percent of all traffic fatalities in Texas. Those grim statistics have been on Mozelle’s mind quite a bit lately. When someone dies in Loving County, Mozelle issues the death certificate. She began to tell me about a recent accident, but then she trailed off and grew quiet. In the brief silence, I thought of the Carrs’ wagon-wheel burial site. After a moment, Mozelle continued, “You just worry about anybody that is on the roads.”

Michael Moore still believes in the Code of the West. I met the fifty-year-old rancher this fall at an annual barbecue held for the friends and clients of an oil field electrical company in Andrews. (The odds of one of these events being teetotaler-dry or dangerously lubricated are about fifty-fifty; this one was sponsored by a snow-haired Baptist, so the hardest drink on hand was sweet tea.) We shook hands while waiting to load our plates with steaks grilled by a crew down from Abilene. After a bit of small talk, I asked Michael how many head of cattle he ran on his spread. He studied me from under the brim of his black felt cowboy hat. “We don’t ask folks that out here,” he said.

Nonetheless, he politely offered to give me a tour of his corner of the Permian Basin, his ranch in southwestern Andrews County and the sand dunes of northern Winkler County. A few days later I climbed into his F-350, and we bumped down Texas Highway 128, a trash-strewn two-lane road connecting Andrews to Jal, New Mexico. Earlier that morning, three hours before sunrise, Michael and one of his cowhands had saddled their horses, loaded them into a trailer, and driven to a nearby property to help round up another rancher’s cattle. “We still neighbor quite a bit in this part of the country,” Michael told me. “We keep up with each other.”

He played a role in shaping the industry that has brought workers to this part of the Permian. Starting in the fall of 2016, he and his neighbors were approached by companies asking them to lease or sell their land. Unlike the landmen who’d come knocking before, these people weren’t interested in the oil beneath the ground; they were after the sand sitting on top. (Fracking requires a lot of fine-grade silica sand to blast open the formations.) Up until then, most of the sand had been dug from Central Texas or up in Wisconsin and Minnesota and shipped in by rail. By harvesting the sand right here in the Permian Basin, drilling companies could save a fortune on transportation. Michael and his family decided to lease part of their ranch to one of the sand-mining outfits. It was a pragmatic choice: they knew the sand companies were coming anyway, with or without a piece of their land. Since January 2017, more than twenty mining facilities have been constructed among the rolling dunes that stretch from Crane (30 miles south of Odessa) to Kermit (45 miles west of Odessa). “The New Texas Gold Rush,” the Wall Street Journal dubbed the craze.

Michael was attuned to the difficult balance between profit and preservation. His grandfather-in-law ranched in the Permian for 99 years before he died 12 years ago. Before he passed, he told Michael, “Take care of your water. One day it will be worth more than all that oil and gas.”

Michael was also keenly aware of the financial hardships brought on by the boom. When we drove the rut-worn road into Kermit, it seemed like just about every weedy vacant lot in the city had been converted into an RV park. We turned into one of these encampments right off Main Street. Trash littered the grounds. Lawn furniture, such as it was, came in the form of wooden spools from the patch, which were used as stools or tables. A couple of haggard-looking and sun-bronzed men still wearing their greasers pitched washers into Bud Light cans. Their barbecue grills were welded from drilling pipe, and satellite dishes were anchored to the ground with cinder blocks. A tiny pink Barbie bike rested against the side of one mobile home. “That’s what really pulls at me sometimes,” Michael said, eyeing the bike and a few toys lying in the dirt. “That’s that kid’s backyard out there, outside the little trailer in the rocks.”

Whereas boomtowns were once marked by a flood of workers and families living out of tents, today’s oil patch is overrun with RVs. As long as a landowner can supply electricity and water, she can charge $600 to let a worker park his motor home on a piece of otherwise useless dirt. My parents had gotten in on the action in Andrews. Since the boom began, all thirteen spaces behind their house have been taken. My folks provide Wi-Fi and utilities. They keep their property tidy. It’s safe. The same cannot be said for a lot of these parks.

And those who can afford to live in the parks are often the lucky ones. “You’ll have some guys who show up with their own RV, and you know they’re good to go,” Michael said. “They weren’t completely broke when they came out here. But then you’ve got some who are eating every other day till they get that first paycheck. Some of ’em are sleeping in their cars or living in a motel room with five other guys working twelve-hour shifts. They’re not keeping much for themselves. They’re sending it back to a wife and kids four states away. They haven’t been home in three months. They’re just trying to survive.”

Of course, those who really profit from a boom—the oil executives and engineers—don’t risk their lives on the rigs or make their homes anywhere near the dust of West Texas. Big oil companies, which once had sizable offices in the Permian, now maintain their headquarters in Dallas and Houston and other urban centers. The men and women who are left to toil in the Permian are essentially the dry-gulch farmers of the industry. And even those jobs are under threat. Big oil has brought automation to the patch, and there are 50,000 fewer jobs in oil and gas than there were during the last boom.

As we headed back toward Andrews County, we passed what was once an oil field camp in the old Dollarhide Field. I asked Michael to pull over so I could walk around. I could see a few sand silos on the horizon. The rest was a flat sea of mesquite and shin oak, still green from the recent rains. A hawk perched on a fencepost. It was quiet, save for the rhythmic groans of a pumpjack. At its peak, some thirty families had called this patch of dust home. Now the only signs that anyone had ever dwelled there were a clump of dead elm trees and a few broken concrete slabs rising from the pale dirt.

This article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Price of Oil.” Subscribe today.