God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(13)
Nick Fowler, the younger brother of Mack Fowler, the oilman I met in Houston, operates a petrochemical plant in Odessa. Nick is a ruddy man whose strikingly white hair and moustache look like a disguise. He is what is known as a “downstream” oilman. Upstream are the people who find the oil and the money to drill. Midstream are the pipeline operators and people who move the product to refineries and to market. At the end of the stream, Nick makes a kind of plastic that is a by-product of the refining of gasoline. “We take a hydrocarbon and turn it into a polymer,” he explained, as he showed me around the plant, with its inscrutable towers and a maze of pipes and gangplanks. I remembered as a child seeing plants like this lit up at night on the flat horizon like some kind of Mad Max skyscrapers.
Nick handed me a sample of his end product, a malleable glob, which in the trade is called a “potato,” although it more closely resembles a pregnant ravioli. “It’s a form of polypropylene used for hot-melt adhesives,” he told me. I recognized it then as the same substance I use in a hot-glue gun. When melted, the potato becomes spreadable. “The biggest use is in the assembly of non-woven materials, like in feminine hygiene products, disposable diapers, panty liners, adult incontinence,” Nick said. “Our adhesives hold the layers together. Diapers are a very complicated structure.”
Unfortunately, on the day I visited, the plant was on the blink. As he drove me through the facility, Nick rolled down the window and stopped to talk to his three engineers. A train car was waiting to take the next shipment of polymer to market, and who knows how many fortunes were being lost, but the engineers were unfazed. Actually, they all seemed a little amused and excited. They had an interesting problem to work on. The lead engineer, J. J. DeCair, speculated about what might be wrong, possibly a water leak in a condenser. Nick drove on, praising his crew. J.J. was self-taught, “an American genius of the same ilk as Wilbur and Orville Wright.” It takes a lot of ingenuity to run a petrochemical plant. Here they were, in one of the most desolate parts of Texas, on a hundred-degree day, having a pretty great time.
Later that afternoon, Nick drove me to the Odessa Country Club for dinner. On the highway next to a strip club there was a large lot where unused oil rigs were stored. Every Friday at noon, Baker Hughes, a giant oil-field-services company in Houston, releases a “rig count”: a measure of how many new wells are being drilled in the U.S. It is the most closely watched barometer of the drilling industry’s health. On that Friday evening in June 2016, when Nick and I went to dinner, only 421 rigs were being put to use in the U.S., less than a tenth of the 4,500 rigs that were at work in December 1981, the highest count since records began to be kept. In the lot that Fowler and I passed, there were 47 unused rigs lined up in parallel ranks. “They cost fifteen to eighteen million dollars apiece,” Nick observed. He estimated the total investment of the idle rigs to be as much as $850 million.
We sat in the empty dining room watching a storm blow in across the flayed landscape. Golfers raced into the clubhouse as lightning lit up the giant black sky like war. The rain itself was paltry, typical of the noisy, uncharitable storms of this part of Texas.
Through the picture window, the idle rigs on the horizon, illuminated by the blinding flashes, looked like ideal lightning attractors. There have long been dreams of harvesting the electrical power of Texas’s many lightning strikes. In 2006, a company called Alternative Energy Holdings announced its intent to create lightning farms, and it actually set up an experimental lightning-capture tower in Houston, where there are lots of electrical storms and a huge demand for power. Nothing came of it, but I was reminded of the scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly has to capture energy from a lightning bolt on the clock tower in order to power his DeLorean back to present time.
I asked Nick if he ever thought of leaving Odessa. “Only on mornings when the sun rises in the east,” he admitted. “When the weather’s nice, it’s delightful, although it’s still not very attractive.” On the other hand, he liked being in a place where “the people at the laundry know your name.” Mainly, he was comforted by the 210 good jobs he provided.
Fracking saved the economy of the Permian Basin, Nick observed, but it wasn’t going to last forever. When he and Mack were boys, their parents took them on vacation to Colorado, and they stopped in Leadville, headquarters of the great silver boom in the 1880s. Leadville then sported a dozen theaters, including the grand Tabor Opera House, where Oscar Wilde and Harry Houdini performed. The lobby floor of a hotel was paved with silver dollars. After Denver, it was the largest city in the state. Only a few thousand people live there now. It’s a meager tourist stop, gateway to the gold-mining ghost towns in the mountains. At best, Nick said, the Permian Basin has another twenty-five years before it follows the same path. “Fortunes change. People move on. How can it be any different in Odessa?”
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I REMEMBER after the great bust in the 1980s there were bumper stickers reading “Please, God, Send Me One More Oil Boom. This Time, I Promise Not to Piss It Away.” That bust lasted for nearly twenty years.
Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The centralization of wealth—whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or any extractable commodity—often leads to corruption and authoritarianism. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Louisiana are primary examples. In such a society the economy rises and falls by a single measure. Where money comes out of the ground, luck and a willingness to take risks are the main factors that determine one’s future, not talent or education or hard work. Money so easily acquired comes to seem well deserved, because those who have it must be either uniquely perspicacious or divinely favored.