Part 1 of a two-part series

by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence

In September 2025, I traveled to West Texas to join Sharon Wilson and Miguel Escoto of Oilfield Witness on a three-day fact-finding tour of the nation’s leading oil-extracting region, the Permian Basin, which has allowed the United States to become the world’s number one oil producer. Fully half of all U.S. crude oil is extracted from the Permian. Intensely fracked, the Permian Basin is also the one of the world’s top sources of greenhouse gases, particularly methane. The Permian Basin is a planetary carbon bomb whose emissions are visible from space via satellite imaging, and also via Optical Gas Imaging cameras, which Oilfield Witness uses on the ground to reveal the fossil fuel industry’s false narratives about this place.

Every month this column explores unintended consequences. The trench warfare tactics of World War I that advanced groundwater cartography. The ability of gas stoves to drive sales of asthma inhalers for children. Data center cooling systems that turn groundwater into atmospheric humidity and so alter hydrologic cycles.

This month we examine one very intentional consequence: the relentless determination of a desperate Texan named George Mitchell to make money by fracturing shale with pressurized fluids in order extract the bubbles of natural gas trapped inside, and what fracking has done to the part of West Texas called the Permian Basin.

Fracking was not an invention of Mitchell’s. It had first been tried in the 1940s, but until Mitchell figured out, in 1997, a way to do it cheaply, fracking was simply not commercially viable. Mitchell’s innovation was to use water as the sledgehammer instead of expensive gels.

Water, even in arid Texas, is cheap.

Drilling horizontally through the shale layers also helped. It took Mitchell 15 years of intentions in the form of trial-and-error struggle to figure it all out, spurred on by the fact that his oil and gas wells were drying up, investors were walking away, and conventional drilling on this vast landholdings was approaching the level of diminishing returns.

There’s an alternative timeline in which Mitchell gives up and goes broke, and all the predictions of his detractors about peak oil, made in the 1990s, come true. If so, we would be living in a very different world today.

But George Mitchell prevailed, and high-volume, horizontal fracking using drinking water, sand, and chemicals really did become the innovation that commuted the foretold death sentence of the U.S. oil and gas industry. Fracking is now used in 75-90 percent of all new drilling operations in the United States. Let’s look at some of the intended consequences for west Texas.

From the historical timeline outside the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas. Photo by Sandra Steingraber.

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The Permian Basin is a geological name that refers to thick layers of subterranean sediment that sank during tectonic processes and formed a depression in the Earth’s crust in a vast area—250 miles wide and 300 miles long—of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.

The word Permian indicates the when, rather than the where of the place. The Permian is the final period of the Paleozoic Era when all the continents glommed together to form Pangea. Recall that the Permian Period ended with catastrophic loss of life and the Earth’s largest mass extinction.

Which feels resonant.

Midland, Texas, population 132,000, serves as the unofficial capital of the Permian Basin and the staging grounds for a plethora of fossil fuel operations.

It’s also the place where the television screens in the many residential hotel lobbies that host the oil industry’s corporate managers are tuned to Christian Broadcasting Network programming. Which never mention the pre-historic period from 299 to 252 million years ago.

Everything else does though. The local college, for example, is the University of Texas Permian Basin, and petroleum engineering is its dominant field of study. There’s the Permian Basin Regional Planning Commission, the Permian Basin Area Foundation, the Permian Basin Pipeline Company, and the region’s cultural crown jewel: the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum.

It seemed strange to me, who raised my kids in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and taught them how to swim in those very same lakes, to name a place after a landscape feature that no one has ever seen. The Permian Basin is a bowl of rock miles below the surface of the earth that used to be the sediments of an ocean floor and now serves as a cemetery for the liquefied and vaporized corpses of all the oceanic organisms that once swam in it. A burial ground that the oil and gas industry calls a shale play.

Collection of drill bits in the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum. Photo by Sandra Steingraber.

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The first stop on our tour, the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, made this hidden landscape visible. Its exhibits invited us to “step back in time over 250 million years ago, when this area was the Permian Sea. Watch the geological history of how the Permian Basin was formed. Microscopic viewers tell the story of the formation of oil from microscopic creatures.”

And there it was, rendered in art, animated video, and dioramic depiction: the ancient Permian Sea that once overlay this part of the world and its incremental evolution into an oilfield.

I learned from these exhibits that the Permian Basin actually consisted of two underwater basins with a raised area in between them that provided ideal conditions for reef-building organisms. The Permian was the Great Barrier Reef of 200 million years ago, and, like all coral reefs, provided a rich habitat for all kinds of species. Which is why its shale layers now contain so much carbon in the form of oil and gas.

The remainder of the museum, which is funded by many of the oil majors, serves as an homage to the oil and gas industry itself, which is portrayed as the creator and shaper of human civilization.

The exhibits begin with a timeline walk that connects the parking lot to the front entrance. A series of stone blocks—which oddly resemble gravestones—commemorate key moments in the history of petroleum.

Starting with a bold claim that references something that some ancient Chinese farmers did with bamboo poles, as if the oil industry co-evolved with human civilization and did not, in fact, begin in 1859 with a commercial well drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania: “400 BC: first oil well dug.”

Standard Oil gets a rock: “1870: John D. Rockefeller and associates form the first integrated oil company.”

Putting Texas on the map: “1923: discovery well of the Big Lake Field, the Santa Rita #1 comes in.”

Fracking also gets a rock: “1947: hydraulic fracturing first used to stimulate oil production.”

Finally, near the front door, we hit the 21st century and national glory: “2000: horizontal drilling breaks up Bakken Shale reserve, largest global oil discovery in 40 years AND U.S. becomes world’s largest natural gas producer.”

Inside the museum, I studied a dramatically lit display of drill bits throughout the ages. It was like looking at artifacts from a bygone era, a collection of, say, whale harpoons or arrowheads, except that this technology is…still very much in use.

Water for sale, jackknifed fracking truck, air pollution in the Permian Basin, somewhere outside of Odessa, Texas. Photo by Sandra Steingraber.

Indeed, a massive drilling operation was taking place across the highway, right outside the front doors of the museum, while I looked through the vitrine’s glass at an example of an early rotary disc bit “typically used for drilling in soft formations.”

It occurred to me the Petroleum Museum would be a lot more fun if the outside world now ran on wind, water, and solar power and we could all marvel at how primitive were these tools of Fossil Fuel Era men and how suicidal their frenzied hunt for climate-destroying goo inside the rocks.

See also Ferdinand Magellan’s fateful search for nutmeg.

Indeed, the collection of antique rigs and pumps displayed in an outside exhibit called the Oil Patch looked almost identical to their working counterparts just a few hundred yards away.

Working conditions in the oilfields were described in several displays—and in contradictory ways. The ever-present danger of being blown up was presented as courage and self-sacrifice. The displays acknowledge that drilling and fracking had displaced ranching in West Texas but imply that cowboys became more manly when they turned into roughnecks.

Paintings of oilfield workers in action showed rippling muscles swinging impossibly big tools. By contrast, the images of pre-oil-era ranching operations showed thin men standing next to sad children.

Another display, however, emphasized that, even though oil drilling is exciting and dangerous, the industry is safe because “employers know that their most valuable assets are the people who keep the operation running. The petroleum industry has a great safety record.”

Hmm. The AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job report has another story to tell here.

A big point made again and again in the Petroleum Museum’s various exhibits: all those predictions about the inevitable end of oil have never come true and ergo “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.” Those were actual words of a banner hanging in one of the rooms.

The immortality of the oil and gas industry is made possible by two factors, according to the museum’s narrative. The first is fracking, of course, and the second is enhanced oil recovery, aka carbon capture and storage, which uses liquefied CO2 to dissolve and push sticky, residual oil droplets out of microscopic pores:

Question: Will I still have a job if the oil runs out?

Answer: This isn’t going to happen any time soon. New techniques of EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) are bringing new wells into service and making old ones cost-effective to re-open.

I looked for any mention of climate change. I found none. Oil and gas were referred to as energy. Wind and solar power, when mentioned, were referred to as “supplemental energy.” The museum gift shop, featured a children’s picture book called Good Night, Drilling Rig.

The landscape of the Permian Basin. Photo by Sandra Steingraber.

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The next three days were spent driving hundreds of miles across the surface of the earth that overlies the geological formation called the Permian Basin. This is a very noisy landscape of massive truck convoys, pipelines, compressor stations, drill rigs, fracking operations, pump jacks, processing plants, storage tanks, fracking waste pits, electrical substations, massive banks of turbines, and flare stacks. So many flare stacks.

And some cotton fields. And some cattle. And a purple-flowered shrub called silverleaf nightshade that looked bathed in moonlight even in the full sun.

It's difficult to convey in words the enormity of the Permian Basin or just how chaotically industrialized it is. At 86,000 square miles, the Permian Basin is bigger than Florida. Bigger even than Great Britain. Miles of dirt road with no cell service. Yet stepping outside anywhere in the basin is like breathing while walking in heavy urban traffic. The sky was blue but the air was smoggy. We all got sore throats.

Wherever we went, equipment and machinery whirred and roared. Standing near a row of compressor stations was like standing on a tarmac next to a jet plane. And yet we saw very few workers during our three days of visiting various sites throughout the basin. In some cases, the equipment was clearly malfunctioning with no one on site to fix the problem. At one point, a giant plume of black smoke suddenly appeared on the horizon and blotted out the sky. Eventually, we heard sirens and saw emergency vehicles rushing toward the smoke.

At another site, we found a lone worker bent over a storage tank. He had no protective equipment and seemed to be moving strangely. When we stopped to check on him, the chemical smell in the air was overpowering. But he insisted he was fine and was unwilling to tell us much about his working conditions.

The real story was told through Sharon Wilson’s camera. A fifth generation Texan, Wilson is not just a native of this place, she is a certified optical gas imaging thermographer. And just as the museum had made visible the layers of oil-soaked rock below our feet, Wilson’s FLIR camera showed us plumes of invisible methane gas and other volatile organic compounds, like benzene and formaldehyde, that were pouring from nearly every piece of equipment we looked at.

That squat row of noisy compressor stations was transformed by Wilson’s lens to four massive chimneys. That lone, unlit flare stack was not, in fact, just standing there, doing nothing. Through the camera’s eye we could see that it was pouring a vertical current of unburned methane into the atmosphere.

And even that lit flare stack behind it, burning weakly, was not, in fact, combusting all the methane that flowing out of it.

“These are not plumbing problems,” Wilson makes clear. “Don’t call them leaks. These are emissions. These are intentional. You can’t run this equipment without venting methane to control pressures and prevent explosions.”

Fracture the shale, fracture the climate.

The Permian Basin showed me the intended consequences of Texas oilman George Mitchell’s personal dream, 15 years in the making and achieved in 1997, 16 years before his death.

The decibel level of compressor stations at a gas processing plant in the Permian Basin.

The same compressor stations seen through a FLIR camera, which makes methane and VOC emissions visible, and described by Oilfield Witness videographer Sharon Wilson.

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Repercussion Section: The Intended Consequences of the Permian Basin (Part 1)