A tricky time for oil producers

SOME CALL IT “Texarabia”. In Midland, West Texas, every bare 40-acre plot of land appears to have a pumping unit on it, drawing oil from the shale beds of the Permian Basin up to 12,000 feet (3,700 metres) below. One is toiling away in the car park of the West Texas Drillers, the local football team. The Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, on the edge of town, has an exhibition of antique “nodding donkeys” dating back to the 1930s. In a lot behind them a working one is gently rising and falling.

Drive 20 miles north, though, and the pumpjacks are overshadowed by hundreds of wind turbines whirring above them (see picture, next page). In fields of cotton, shimmering white in the early-autumn sun, it is a glimpse of the shifting contours of the energy landscape.

You might think hardened oilmen would resent the turbines pointing the way to a future when the world no longer needs fossil fuels. But Joshua Johnson, who manages a string of oil leases in the area and proudly shows your correspondent the lustrous crude he stores in 500-barrel oil batteries, sees things differently, saying: “I...