Tapped Out, but Hopeful: A Break in Texas’s Oil Decline

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
New York Times

CRANE, Texas — The North McElroy oil field here in West Texas has long been a tableau of rusty tanks and worn-out pump jacks. “Not in Use” is painted across broken electrical panels affixed to an abandoned building.

With oil prices setting records, years of neglect finally appear to be coming to an end. The Apache Corporation is drilling new wells. Workers are flocking to sparsely populated West Texas, living in motels and trailer parks. Dishwashers and teachers are fleeing their jobs for $60,000 gigs in the fields.

But for all the new wealth and activity, the best the industry can hope to accomplish is to slow the decline of American oil production. The good times here are not nearly as good as they were in the last big oil boom in the 1970s and 1980s — and nobody expects they will get that way, how ever high prices rise.

“Nobody’s drinking Champagne or even beer out of cowboy boots this time,” said Daniel Yergin, an oil historian and industry consultant. “There’s a sense of limited possibilities.”

The big problem: the nation’s oil fields are mostly tapped out. While modern technology is giving workers the ability to squeeze more crude out of wells in North McElroy and other oil patches around the country, overall output is on an intractable slide. In the United States, oil production has fallen in every one of the last six years, according to the government, even as prices quadrupled.

Last year’s production of 1.86 billion barrels of crude oil was the nation’s lowest since 1949, and production, at best, will level off this year.

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