The Legacy of the Permian Basin Begins

Wildcatters in the Permian Basin from 1920 to 1960 proved up a tremendous resource.


By Travis E. Poling, Contributing Editor


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More than a dozen teams of horses stood at the ready to haul wagonloads of lumber from the Texas & Pacific railroad depot at Colorado City, Texas. The workers posed for a photo while standing atop the loads destined for a Mitchell County lease on railroad land. At the end of the 17-mile journey the lumber became a drilling derrick, and in June 1920, the site became the first commercial discovery well in the Permian Basin.

After putting nitroglycerine torpedoes down the hole, the well eventually came in flowing 129 barrels a day before tapering off to 20 a day. It was enough, though, to drill a second well on the next closest lease.

It was an inauspicious start to development of what became the largest oil-producing basin in the United States, topping 33 billion barrels of production between 1920 and 2018. There are now 7,000 fields spread across 86,000 square miles, covering more than 60 Texas counties and two in southeastern New Mexico.

The beginnings of the Westbrook Field in 1920 and 1921 didn’t set off an immediate rush to lease land in the vast and shifting sands of the Permian Basin. There wasn’t much to recommend it using the geologic knowledge of the time. Other than decades of poking holes in the ground for water to try to make ranching and farming successful, there was little data for major oil companies to bet on.

Most of Texas, or at least those places with promis- ing surface structures, had been explored. There had been some success in Ranger, west of Fort Worth in Eastland County, and with the Toyah-Bell No. 2 in Reeves County, but those were in counties on the edge of what was determined as the Permian Basin.

Speculation, however, was in full force in the 1920s before the nation’s financial markets and economy collapsed in 1929. That fervor led entrepreneurial West Texans to buy up leases—on the cheap—from the State of Texas, railroads, farmers and ranchers, and to sell them off in blocks at a profit. Money and leases would change hands several times over, but eventually someone was going to have to drill.

Today, we know many of the largest oil fields ever found in the Lower 48 were discovered in the Permian Basin between 1920 and the 1950s. Several have produced more than 1 billion barrels of oil. Many of these legendary fields are being revived today with advanced horizontal drilling techniques to produce more oil.