Cartoon Of the Week

Which is more important, cheap gasoline or fresh water to grow food, raise livestock, and drink?

Unconventional HZ wells in the Permian Basin are better than wells in the other two of America's largest shale oil basins but leasehold acquisition and drilling and completion costs are much higher and economics only marginally better than elsewhere in the United States. Oil market differentials are greater in the Permian and rising gas to oil ratios lead to enormous amounts of associated gas being wasted up flare stacks with no ensuing revenue. The cost of frac source water and disposal of produced water is high and going much higher in West Texas, so says Woods MacKenzie in an article by Rigzone titled, The Largest Challenge to Permian Field Development, here.

America loves cheap gasoline, Trump likes to use Permian light tight oil as a foreign policy tool and everybody likes to have well paying jobs. If West Texas runs completely out of water and turns the entire region in to a dust bowl...

...the entire rest of America, or the world, will not give so much as a rats ass.

Political cartoons are designed to be thought provoking and folks in West Texas need to be provoked into thinking where they might live when they run out of water out there in a few years, high paying jobs or not.