Advanced BioFuels USA

by Christian Wallace (Texas Monthly)  … I was riding shotgun with Josh Snow, an old friend who’s worked his way up the ranks at his father’s independent oil company. The two of us were driving the thirty-mile stretch from our hometown of Andrews to attend the Permian Basin International Oil Show, in Odessa. Held every other year since 1950, the Oil Show is one of the area’s most anticipated events, a sort of South by Southwest for oilmen (and they are almost all men), where anyone in the business can connect with potential clients and preview the latest tech: drilling rigs that can “walk” from one site to the next, “smart” bits that guide themselves down a wellbore. In 2016, because of a downturn, the show’s organizers were worried about filling all their booths. This time around, in October 2018, more than seven hundred companies had jockeyed for a space, and another three hundred had been placed on a waiting list. Some 30,000 people would attend over three days.

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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. 

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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.

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The benefit of this boom to actual West Texans, however, is less clear.

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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.  READ MORE

A Leader of America’s Fracking Boom Has Second Thoughts: Pioneer Natural Resources once promised production to rival Libya. Now it’s pulling back. (Wall Street Journal)