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Economy

Lone Star Rising

2018-06-22

[Fortune] Smack in the middle of Grier Brunson’s family’s ranch, a patch of West Texas dirt that sprawls across 45 square miles, sits a lush, green dip in the land that the family calls "the draw."

Thousands of years ago, Pueblos built rocky settlements here. Hundreds of years ago, Comanches thundered on horseback across this plain. Today, the natural bounty in and around the draw is producing a rather more modern stampede.

On the rim of the draw, amid the mesquite trees and the sagebrush, oil rigs loom like rockets at launch, and a team fracking a well shoots untold thousands of gallons of water and hundreds of truckloads of sand down into the earth, using huge hydraulic pumps that emit a dull, constant roar. For the Brunson family, these are the sights and sounds of money: Two miles underground, oil‐thousands of barrels of it every day, worth millions of dollars‐is being cracked loose from the rock and pulled up through carefully engineered holes.

Posted by:Besoeker

#3 Interesting times, indeed, Lampedusa Peacock6186.

Posted by: trailing wife 2018-06-22 21:06

#2 Don't look now but the aforementioned big changes are already here.

The North American continent achieved net energy independence this year and by the next campaign season Trump may well be able to run on the idea of imminent (or achieved) US energy independence. Full cycle cost in some shale fields is less than a third of what it was five years ago (and dropping). Increasingly the problems are that there's so much oil the infrastructure doesn't exist to move it from the fields to market and materials can't be delivered fast enough to complete new wells at the pace they're being drilled.

Imagine what might happen when the nation whose military guarantees global stability suddenly finds that it no longer needs the rest of the world for anything critical.

Posted by: Lampedusa Peacock6186 2018-06-22 19:55

#1 It cheers me that the Bedouins have nearly exhausted their low hanging fruit, petrologically speaking. As we get better at getting at the hard to get at stuff here and use it more efficiently big changes will follow.

Posted by: M. Murcek 2018-06-22 06:45

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