On the tenth of January in 1901, in the oil field named Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas, the state, its economy, and its agricultural roots were irrevocably changed. In Spindletop, a drill known as the Lucas No. 1 exploded with oil that sprayed for nine days before finally being capped. It was this event that caused Texas to divert its attention from its agricultural roots and into the Texas oil boom. This boom, aptly named because of the amount of oil found in Texas, was an important part of oil being used as a type of fuel. In the modern day, the Lone Star State has become the world’s biggest oil producer.

Texas’s Largest Producers

As the world’s biggest oil producer, Texas is the proprietor of more than forty percent of United States oil. There are many areas in which oil is drilled throughout the state. The Permian Basin in West Texas, which spans at about 250 miles wide, has over 7,000 fields, making it the highest oil producer in the southwest United States and one of the most significant worldwide. Spanning diagonally across the Lone Star State, the Eagle Ford Shale is another important section of Texas’s oil production, as well as a producer of natural gas. The East Texas Oil Field, while small in comparison to its previously listed counterparts, is one of the most abundant producers of oil in the state of Texas, having produced over five billion barrels since its founding in 1930.

Technological Breakthroughs

Through its high oil production, it’s no wonder that many of the technological breakthroughs and advancements of the oil industry were first founded and utilized in the state of Texas. Fracking, for example, is a process in which high pressure is used to make cracks, or fractures, in formations of bedrock so substances such as oil and natural gas can move more freely to be brought to the surface. This process was first commercially successful when carried out by the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company in 1949, when they used the fracking process in both Archer County, Texas and Stephens County, Oklahoma. Horizontal drilling is another process that was imperative to oil production, as it would make the process of extracting oil more accurate and economically efficient. Much like fracking’s first successes, the first time that horizontal drilling was carried out successfully was in 1929 in Texon, Texas. While these technologies are now used worldwide, their roots first began in the Lone Star State.

The Texas Influence

The influential nature of Texas and its oil production are hard to ignore. Aside from providing nearly half of the United States’s oil production, Texas’s oil reaches far beyond the confines of the North American borders. The power of Texas’s oil production is felt across the globe, supplying and influencing worldwide markets. Such influence makes Texas and its oil production not only of massive importance strategically but helps in providing stability during times of uncertainty.