The aerial view from a Midland, Texas -bound airplane tells the story: thousands of well pads carved into the desert shrubbery as far as the eye can see. It’s all about oil in West Texas. The area is home to the Permian Basin, the most prolific oil-producing formation in the U.S., a hydrocarbon-rich collection of formations that stretch from Texas into New Mexico. Once written off as a place for tumbleweeds, the area has become a boom region in the past decade as the advent of horizontal hydraulic fracturing—”fracking”—brought new investment to waning, vertically drilled oil fields. Crude production in the Permian Basin is at near-record levels, around 2 million barrels per day, according to the Energy Information Agency, for the first time since the early 1970s. But as crude prices have collapsed over the last year amid oversupply and waning global demand, cutbacks have once again starkly taken […]