Categories
Mapping Oil

Geographies of Boom and Bust: Wealth

However, it is interesting to note the large section’s of red in West Texas. While the population was low, it was almost entirely urban. Unlike in the Eastern half of the state, which was dominated by agriculture, oil production (and extreme aridity) in West Texas promoted a population that lived in cities and towns and commuted to remote oilfield jobs, not sustained rural settlement.

The late 1930s boom continued into World War II. The cities of Midland and Odessa quickly became centers of commerce and industrial development. Increasingly, most people in the region lived in and around these two cities and traveled to temporary job sites in the surrounding counties. Aerial maps of both cities demonstrate population growth, and the expansion of oil exploration.

Categories
Mapping Oil

Water Crisis

Things Heat Up in the Permian Basin

While not the hottest region in the state, the Permian Basin experiences cyclical drought. Below is a graph from NOAA map tracking Texas drought conditions. 

There is not a direct, causal relationship between regional drought levels and total Texas oil production. After the early 1930s total allowable production rates were set by state officials who made decisions based upon known oil reserves and the global market. However, since most oil was extracted from rural areas, the wealth generated through oil production was even more important in drought years.

Below is a map tracking annual Texas oil production (in millions of barrels) starting in 1935 and ending in 2015. Data is from the Texas Railroad Commission. A comparison between the Texas Railroad Commission Data and a NOAA map tracking Texas drought conditions reveals some interesting historical context.

 

 

Population and Depletion

During the 1950s, the oil industry underwent massive expansion. That decade also coincides with extended drought in the Permian Basin. Oil expansion kept the region’s cattle ranchers and farmers from bankruptcy.

Also, as oil production increased during the drought-plagued 1950s, the industry put increased strain on the region’s limited potable groundwater. The late 1940s and early 1950s were marked by a regional water crisis only solved through the daming of the Colorado River and the creation of the Colorado River Municipal Water District to provide drinking water for regional settlements.

What does all this mean? 

 

It is clear that the future of Permian Basin oil extraction, like many of the oil producing regions around the world, depends upon an artificially abundant and finite water supply. 

Categories
Mapping Oil

Wealth, Infrastructure, and Risk

Mapping Midland Oil Industry Businesses

After World War II, an increasing number of oil contractors – surveyors, map makers, geologists, engineers, and landmen – set up offices in Midland. The wealthiest rented space in the growing cluster of skycrapers in Midland’s downtown. Others set up smaller offices in the city’s growing suburbs. Many located themselves along I-20 or the Garden City Highway southeast of town.

Using the 1955 Midland City Directory, census data, and historic industry maps I am using GIS to map the city’s oil industrial corridors in relation to residential neighborhoods. This map will allow me to track the relationship between industrialization, income, race, and pollution exposure at midcentury. Below is a preliminary map, done in Google Maps, that pinpoints to location of Midalnd oil businesses in 1955

.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1heBsQVhFJhtYSkHGXx7Eo8GQdE4&usp=sharing

 

Wealth

The region’s earliest oil migrants lived in hotels, boarding houses, and temporary shelters. Below are two photos taken in the 1930s by the US Office of War Information. On the left is a temporary settlement for oil extraction workers. On the right is the more permanant worker housing for refinery employees in Borger, TX.

OWA photos

By the 1950’s most temporary oil workers lived in trailer parks or motels. Below are colorful postcard advertisements for Midland and Odessa hotels.

 

https://sstanfordmcintyre.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Odessa-Travelodge-300x233.jpg

https://sstanfordmcintyre.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/hotelhay-300x191.jpg

https://sstanfordmcintyre.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Ector-County-Court-House-300x225.jpg

motel postcards

[Photo credit: Author collection, Ebay acquisition.]

Despite most workers’ itinerate nature, sustained oil extraction brought with it rising standards of living for residents as well as an influx of disposable income for county governments. In 1942 the Mid Continent Oil and Gas Association documented the 75 Texas counties who produced the highest amount of state tax revenue from the oil industry. As seen in the map on the left, these 75 counties are divided into distinct geographic areas based upon the state’s oil deposits.

1965 maps of tax revenue

The map on the right is more interesting. This map tracks the same 75 counties, identifying what percentage of total county tax revenue comes from oil in 1943. In other words, the second map starkly demonstrates the Permian Basin’s dependence on the oil industry. In comparison with even the Gulf, the Permian Basin had a single industry economy, completely dependent upon the sale of oil and natural gas for regional jobs and regional wealth.

Categories
Mapping Oil

Towers of Debt

Grain Elevators in the Southern Plains Landscape

photo dalhart elevator

[Photo credit: Author, Dalhart, TX, 2014]

In 1936 Gertrude Stein wrote, “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” Almost 70 years later journalist Dan Morgan offers a simple, provocative message, saying “Study grain long enough and the world shrinks.” While these two statements might seem contradictory, both accurately describe the relationship between rural Plains communities, the land, and the agricultural economy during the twentieth century. As early as the 1860s, large-scale monocrop agriculture and sale on international markets were mainstays in the rural American economy. Simultaneously, agricultural America actively sought to maintain a sense of local community and rural autonomy in a changing world. In one seemingly simple, beige package, the great terminal elevators of the American Plains are symbolic of this conflict.

Here I focus specifically on grain elevators in the Southern Plains region – stretching from Western Texas into Oklahoma and Kansas — as a case study that allows me to combine analysis of the elevator’s economic history and its visual relationship with the landscape. Encompassing the flattest and most arid regions in the “great American desert,” Southern Plains ecology was most catastrophically altered by twentieth century changes in American agriculture, with over harvesting resulting in erosion, drought, and the Dust Bowl.

The building of hundreds of new grain elevators during this period marked the Southern Plains skyline as a reminder of the region’s massive boom in agricultural production. In the1930s, reeling from the combined effect of rock-bottom grain prices and ecological disaster,  farmers embarked on a program of large-scale, cooperative elevator building and acquisition that continued until the 1970s. This program represented an effort to restore order to both an industry and a landscape seemingly flying out of  control.

OWI photo grain storage

[Photo Credit: Office of War Information Photo Collection, Library of Congress]

Maps

My project maps the expansion of the elevator co-op movement, tracking the cycles of grain production, flows of capital, and construction of towering elevators.

Below is a link to preliminary map, done in Google Maps, that uses BNSF Railroad data to locate co-op elevators from the 1920-1930s.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_wqu-r_VpJUJ5Jy-Bgi0ZiGLP7c&usp=sharing

I characterize the co-op elevator movement as both an act of economic defiance as well as a symbolic reclamation of the visual and spatial “high ground” – elevators helped to shore up rural America in the face of continuing economic decline. Embodying the importance of industrial commerce to isolated rural communities and acting as nostalgic symbols of a mythological American agricultural empire, grain elevators are powerful, iconic symbols for both the local populations who interact daily with them and for observers captivated by their size and unique shape.

Further Reading

  • Donna A. Barnes, Farmers In Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmers Alliance and People’s Party in Texas(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
  • William Cronin, Nature’s Metropolis:Chicago and the Great West, (W. & W. Publishing, 1992).
  • Frank Gholke, Measures of Emptiness, (Baltimore: The John’s Hopkins University Press, 1992).
  • Lisa Mahar-Keplinger, Grain Elevators (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993).
  • Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind(New York: Vintage, 1936).
Categories
Mapping Oil

Oil Industry Unions

Regional Oil Industry Unionization

It is commonly assumed that unions have never existed in Texas, let alone in the oil industry. This is not the case. Unionization has a long history in Texas, especially in oil refining and processing industries.

By the end of World War II almost 100 percent of refineries were unionized. The largest of these unions was the Oil Chemicla and Atomic Workers Union (OCAWU). Although unions were generally unpopular in West Texas, the OCAWU launched almost 100 campaigns in the region between 1920 and 1990.

There is some correlation between oil industry salaries and lack of union membership. In the map below, I use data from the Mid Continent Oil and Gas Association to show average 1965 industry salaries by county. Salaries are comparatively very high in the Permian Basin.

map avg employee pay

In the map below, I begin to map patterns of union organizing. In its final form, this map will use historic maps, city directory data and union records that detail both the location of union plants and the home addresses of union members to show connections between income, race, and union membership among West Texas oil workers. It includes the location of all oil pipeline and processing companies in West Texas and tracks the job titles and addresses of oil workers who signed union cards from 1930-1990.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1yVvxkq3K2B8j5CaXTlmHbnNYPmM&usp=sharing

Categories
Mapping Oil

Geographies of Boom and Bust: Population

Early Arrivals

I Between 1923 and 2015 over 29 billion barrels of crude oil and 75 trillion cubic feet of natural gas were pulled from beneath the Texas Permian Basin, making it one of the most prolific oil-producing regions in the world. The search for oil altered the region’s desert ecology and economy, facilitating the growth of a complex industrial network connecting the isolated region to a global system of extraction and commerce.

In the early 1920s, oil discovery prompted an immediate population boom, bringing thousands to Texas’ least populous counties. Oil production, and human migration to West Texas, slowed down in the early 1930s due to a combination of the Great Depression and the discovery of the East Texas field. However, the population boom picked up again in the late 1930’s, continuing – with some exceptions – until the 1970s.

Data from US Census, 1890-1990

The population of the region’s more rural counties, such as Andrews, Yoakum Howard, and Glasscock, rose and fell as much as 90 percent in response to oil production.

Data from US Census, 1890-1990

 In contrast, the region’s urban centers of Odessa and Midland experienced steady population expansion until the 1990s. For example, in 1940 the population of Midland County was 9,352. In 1950 it increased to 21,713. It increased again 1960 to 62,625.

Its All Relative

However, these numbers are relative. Population boom in the sparsely populated western half of the state made up only a fraction of the total Texas population. This was true in 1920, and has continued until the present day. 

 

Above data from US census 1890-1990. “Permian Basin Population” represents county-level data. Counties of Permian Basin as determined by Texas RR Commission .

Categories
Mapping Oil

Bibliography and Further Reading

Further Reading

Mapping provides insight into oil’s geographic expansion, socioeconomic impact, and ecological consequences. However these maps cannot convey the array of personal experiences working and living in and around the oil fields.  See below for oil personnel’s individual stories, in their own words.

Digitized sound recordings of Texas oil industry oral histories, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

Also see

  • Boatright, Mody C. and William A. Owens, Tales from the Derrick Floor: A People’s History of the Oil Industry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
  • Weaver, Bobby, Oilfield Trash: Life and Labor in the Oil Patch (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010).
  • Lambert , Paul, F., Voices from the Oil Fields(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).
  • Lynch Gerald, Roughnecks Drillers, and Tool Pushers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

It is also important to acknowledge the industry’s dark side. There is a growing body of literature describing the impact of oil industrialization on adjacent — often nonwhite — communities. Lack of regulation and intention to oil’s environment impact resulted in increased cancer rates, reproductive and nervous system disorders, and respiratory maladies. Most of these works recount stories of community activism and resilience in the face of corporate indifference and systemic poverty.

  • Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

 

*Note: I have received no compensation for endorsing the above titles. All opinions are my own.

Map Sources

Unless otherwise noted all data sets were transcribed from archival documents, digitized, and mapped by the author. Below is a list of archival collections used.

Images

  • Harvey O’Conner Papers, Walter Reuther Library Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan.
  • EXXON Mobil Historical Collection, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas.
  • Oral Histories Collection, Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, Midland, Texas.

Farm Securities Administration/Office of War Information Black and White Negatives Collection, U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..

Categories
Mapping Oil

Climate, Aridity, and the Limits of Oil Technology

The Sunken Sea

This map documents the locations of large Texas aquifers in conjunction with major oilfields of the 20th century.

West Texas is both the driest region in the state and also the center for on-shore oil extraction operations. Today, with hydraulic fracking technologies the basis of a new oil and gas boom, the industry is in the crosshairs of a heated debate about groundwater depletion and contamination. 

While the stakes are objectively higher in this contemporary battle (This is due to many factors: fracking uses much more water than previous drilling methods, water used in fracking is almost always permanently contaminated and unusable for any other purpose, stress on the region’s water supply has intensified as as the population has increased), water scarcity and the harsh climate have been central inhibitors to West Texas oil expansion for 100 years.  

Oil and Water

Oil extraction began in the eastern part of the state and moved westward. West Texas drilling began in the early 1920s, well before the discovery of major groundwater sources. Precipitation was intermittent at best. Drinking water was scarce – as was water for drilling and refining oil. However by the 1950s, the Permian Basin was the center of onshore oil operations.  

The region’s ancient history explains the presence of oil as well as the arid, inhospitable climate. Millions of years ago, the West Texas Permian Basin was once a shallow, inland sea. Over time, sealife died and drifted to the seabed. This dead plant and animal matter became the oil so prized by 20th century prospectors. This history also partially explains the region’s lack of vegetation and flat terrain. 

This map illustrates average rainfall patters across Texas during the second half of the twentieth century.

What does this mean?

Mapping the Permian Basin’s ancient (and not so ancient) history helps to contextualize contemporary debates about water use, oil extraction and regional sustainability. Lack of water is not a new problem for the region. While the tapping of the Ogallala and other aquifers provided temporary respite from perennial scarcity, the depletion of these resources suggest a return to pre-aquifer scarcity. How fast this happens depends on policymakers and requires hard conversations about the future of the oil industry in West Texas. 

Tools Used

  • QGIS 
  • Vector and raster data from NOAA, Mid Continent Oil and Gas Association, USGS, Texas State Historical Association, Texas General Land Office