BLOOMBERG.COM
If Texas’s Permian Basin is Exhibit A for the U.S. oil boom that refuses to die, then the Eagle Ford, a smaller shale patch some 400 miles to the east, represents all those places that have been left behind.
If Texas’s Permian Basin is Exhibit A for the U.S. oil boom that refuses to die, then the Eagle Ford, a smaller shale patch some 400 miles to the east, represents all those places that have been left behind.
It’s not that the oil rigs totally disappeared after crude prices abruptly collapsed in 2014. But it’s awful quiet. The wells here aren’t the kind of gushers that make it attractive to keep pumping at $50 a barrel.
As the shale drillers moved on to richer fields, the South Texas landscape became pockmarked with abandoned structures. This nimbleness—the ability to just pack up and leave at a moment’s notice—may give U.S. oil companies a competitive advantage against their more rigid state-run OPEC rivals, but there is a human cost to it all.
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