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When an oil bust takes hold in West Texas, no one is spared: Drilling rigs collect dust, barber chairs sit empty, students drop out of school and lines swell at the food bank. In May and June, I drove around the Permian Basin documenting the crisis for the @WSJ. THREAD.
Oil companies are pulling back on drilling new wells and capping off existing ones. By early July, there were just 125 rigs left drilling for oil in the Permian, roughly 1/3 of the number at the end of 2019. Here, men cap off a well near Pecos.
Pody’s BBQ, a mainstay for roughnecks when oil was booming, has lost 30% of its sales. Many of their customers can no longer afford expensive offerings like brisket, so they’ve add less expensive items like enchiladas and burgers.
“You could see it coming. Then the pandemic hit and that was even worse.” Mr. Campos says. Due to the pandemic, the family had difficulty finding meat to smoke, at times driving hours away to buy new cuts.
In Fort Stockton, the local school district lost touch with 10% of its student body since spring break. Administrators figure some of those students have moved away permanently, in some cases because their parents lost oilfield jobs. They held a socially distance graduation
at the end of May, where students like Katie Salmon and Rebecca Rodriguez graduated. Both women are slated to attend the University of Texas in Austin in the fall but are unsure what will happen due to the pandemic.
Unused equipment is everywhere you look in the Permian Basin. Shown here in Odessa and Monahans.
Matt Elliott is the chief executive of a service and equipment rental company in Pecos and expects his company’s revenue to be 50% to 70% below last year’s. He was celebrating his birthday the day we met.
The West Texas Food Bank has distributed nearly 900,000 pounds of food per month since March, up from about 550,000 pounds last year. 74% of the households collecting food in April had never been to the food bank before. The National Guard came in to help package and load.
I met 57-year-old Abe Guerrero as he picked up food during a distribution. He was furloughed from his job as a safety manager for an oil field trucking company. “It’s a different way of life these days. It’s like a third-world country.” His dog, Toby, is 17-years-old.
I also met people like Anthony Ward in Monahans, grateful to still be employed. “We all worked in the oil field enough to know it’s always going up and down, so you always keep money in the back page because it’s gonna happen eventually.”
Some people are making a shift. Paul Weatherby’s family has collected royalties from oil production on their Fort Stockton-area ranch for nearly a century but has recently started leasing land for solar fields.
“We’re not engineers, but from a redneck standpoint, it seems like they have too much competition. Whenever you have a rig sitting there drilling well after well and Tom, Dick and Harry are drilling the same thing, you get nervous.”
There’s a lot more on this but you can read the story from @cmatthews9 and @rfelliott here. @MBucher_Photo did the big lifting on this project. https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-a-texas-oil-boom-busts-11594440031
