Out Now in Fortune: Inside America's Oil Boom

U.S. oil output is breaking records, the result largely of a boom in production from West Texas’ iconic Permian Basin. The Permian gusher is enriching landowners, straining infrastructure, fraying tempers, and changing the geopolitics of energy. My take on this back-to-the-future resurgence of the West Texas oil patch, “Lone Star Rising,” is just out in Inside an #oil #boom in West #Texas' #Permian Basin that's altering life in the region and redrawing the #energy landscape around the world.Fortune. It's a tale of big money, big personalities, and big problems.

One local oil-equipment mechanic put it to me this way: “We’re busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.” An international oil executive was only slightly more buttoned-down: “There is hype in the market now. Everybody’s trying to build a position in the Permian.”

Here's the piece's bottom line: "The Permian, in short, is a window onto an energy system that’s heading back to the future—to a time that, in fundamental ways, looks a lot like the start of the Oil Age a century ago. Over the years, Big Oil has buzzed over a succession of faraway frontiers: Saudi Arabia, Russia, West Africa. Now it’s agog anew about the place where it effectively was born: the West Texas desert."

Feel free to share the story. Note too the pictures from award-winning photographer Ben Lowy that accompany the piece. More of my writing is at jeffreyball.net.