THE PERMIAN BASIN OILFIELD: A “TRUE” OVERVIEW

On April 22, 2014, while on a commercial jet airliner flight from Los Angeles, California to Dallas, Texas, I looked out the window and saw a vast array of very closely spaced oilwells in the southeastern New Mexico/western Texas region. The first two images show what I saw (at about 35,000 feet elevation). The little whitish rectangles denote oilwells.

The following image is via Google Earth Satellite (2023) and shows a close-up of a very small portion of the Permian Basin, in the same general area as shown in the previous two images). All of these aerial photos pertain to the vicinity of the town of Jal, New Mexico. Roads  are the long straight lines. The red line with arrows at the end denotes 1 mile of distance on the land. The little white rectangles are the individual oil wells.

The oilfield in this region is referred to by petroleum geologists as “The Permian Basin,” which is a large (greater than 86,000 square miles), thick sedimentary basin with petroleum-containing beds of Pennsylvanian to Permian geologic age. These beds have been folded and faulted, thereby providing structural traps to contain the subterranean oil. This basin is the largest petroleum-producing basin in the United States and has already produced a cumulative 28.9 billion barrels of oil and 75 trillion cubic feet of gas. The Permian Basin is the world’s second largest oil field (Wikipedia.org., 2023).

I strongly suggest that the next time you are on a jetliner, emulate a geologist and try your best to get a window seat. Also, keep your cell phone handy!