What the Permian Oil Boom Looks Like - Bloomberg: The first clear indication that I had entered an area experiencing an oil boom was the Halliburton Co. office with a “Now Hiring” sign out front on the north side of Artesia, New Mexico. Next came a couple of equipment rental places with some unfamiliar-looking equipment on their lots, then the first of what were to be many billboards advertising personal injury lawyers specializing in oilfield injuries and truck accidents (“$5.2 Million: Oilfield Explosion, Burn Injury” read one that I saw a little later from the Albuquerque law firm of Glasheen, Valles & Inderman). Tanker car after tanker car after tanker car sat on the railroad tracks to the left of the road, followed by what I eventually realized were lots of cars for hauling sand. Behind the railcars, I began to see the outlines of what appeared to be a giant refinery complex.
Artesia is at the northwestern edge of what is known as the Permian Basin, named for the geologic period that came right before the Triassic and the Jurassic (which, as a childhood dinosaur fanatic, I find useful as context) and left a whole lot of marine organic matter across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico that spent the next 252 million years turning into oil and natural gas. Humans drilled the first successful oil well in the Texas part of the Permian in 1921, and the first big New Mexico strike came in 1928.
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