The Oil Ghost Towns of Texas
“Lord, just give me one more boom, and this time I promise I won’t piss it away.”
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.