Oil Ghost Towns Dot the Landscape in Texas' Other Shale Patch

Oil Ghost Towns Dot the Landscape in Texas' Other Shale Patch
If Texas' Permian Basin is Exhibit A for the US oil boom that refuses to die, then the Eagle Ford represents all those places that have been left behind.

From the outset, the place was hopping.

The Eagle Ford was in full swing and the roughnecks would come from miles around to scarf down platefuls of brisket, sausage and ribs and wash it down with sweet tea served at long picnic tables under a corrugated metal roof. Things were going so well that Garcia opened a second location just down the road in the town of Kenedy.

And then the drilling slowed to a crawl, and those long lines of diners became a distant memory. “It was scary,” Garcia says. “It got real slow.” Today, the two restaurants combined are generating only the revenue that the first one did on its own a few years ago.

Garcia, 51, got into the barbecue business late in life. For years, he had worked in, and around, the oil industry, most recently at a facility that makes drilling equipment for Baker Hughes Inc.

Eight years ago, in the wake of yet another oil market collapse, he was laid off. "It left a bad taste in my mouth," Garcia says. "I wanted to start over in something new."

Unemployed, he passed his spare time grilling meat and drinking beer with friends. Eventually, they convinced him to turn his passion into a profession.

He tries to put a positive spin on the current slowdown. His business has picked up at least some of late. And he says he’s not even sure he’d like to return to the days when it was a constant challenge to cook the food fast enough to feed the crowds. He remembers waking up at 2 a.m. nearly every day to start smoking brisket and finishing after 6 p.m., when the last of the catering jobs was done.

“The boom was good for business,” Garcia says, "but it’s not a fun way to live."

Randy Katzmark was fast asleep late one Sunday night when his phone rang. It was a rig operator. He was in need of a “hot shot,” industry jargon for an urgent delivery of essential equipment—drill bits in this case.

It’s the kind of job that Katzmark, 60, would have likely turned down a few years ago. But not now. Not with his company, R. Katz Tool & Supply Inc., struggling the way it is. During the height of the Eagle Ford boom, R. Katz was supplying as many as 52 rigs and employing as many as 18 people in its office outside Cuero’s main strip. Today, it’s got 11 rig clients and three employees.

So Katzmark got out of bed and hopped into his black Ford F-350 pickup truck. It was a few minutes after midnight. By the time he got the parts, dropped them off and pulled back into his driveway, the sun was starting to come up. “I’m trying to keep the doors open and keep the few employees I do have,” he says.

Katzmark has been working in the oil industry since the mid-1980s. He’s worn many hats over the years and even did stints in South America—Venezuela, Colombia and Bolivia—before founding R. Katz in 2004, four years before the first shale well was drilled in the Eagle Ford, ushering in the region’s go-go days.

He spends a lot of his time in his pickup, driving the highways and country roads that crisscross the Eagle Ford landscape. A recent trip took him south, through the industrial corridors surrounding the town of Alice, and revealed the scars the bust has left. Massive corrugated metal structures that housed offices and warehouses supporting the frenetic drilling activity are empty now. Faded paint on the sides spells out names of companies such as Drilco and Genco and Forum Energy Technologies. Weeds run wild in parking lots that were once full of trucks and equipment.

To Katzmark, the place looks like a “ghost town.”


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David Thompson  |  September 27, 2017
If youre not from that area, stay away from the Permian Basin. nuff said.


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