– Chapter 1 –
The Coming Crude-Oil Crisis
There are 12 million cattle in Texas. I’m sure I passed them all on the way to Alpine.
In early 2017, I decided to drive out and see the hottest new oil play in West Texas for myself. It’s called the “Alpine High.” It’s about six hours from Fort Worth... straight southwest on I-20. Alpine, Texas is a town of about 6,000 people. In the late 1800s, it was a campsite for cattlemen and rail workers. Today, there’s nothing much to see out there. It’s high desert for Texas. About 4,500 feet above sea level, it’s around 60 degrees at night. That makes the 100-degree days tolerable. The trip took me through Midland, Texas. Most of the people there work in the oil business in some way or another. Midland has about 150,000 people – 155,000 in good times and 140,000 in bad. Outside Midland, I stopped at the Toot’n Totum convenience store to get gas and a cup of coffee. I asked the fellow behind the desk, “How’s it going?” He said, “Pretty good.” His name was Raphael. He had been a “roustabout” driving a backhoe for eight years, making $25 an hour plus time-and-a-half overtime. But that was at $100-a-barrel oil. Everyone was drilling then. And Midland was a boomtown. Since the collapse of oil and gas prices, those jobs disappeared. Raphael was out of work for six months until he started working the store’s day shift for eight bucks an hour. It’s still cattle country – big ranches, big sky.
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