A hundred-foot oil rig pushes up amid acres of irrigated cotton fields and long dirt roads on this oil patch between Midland and Odessa, the two main towns in the Permian Basin in West Texas. Both have about 150,000 people. Tommy Taylor, director of oil and gas development at Fasken Oil and Ranch, seems to know most of them.
Taylor has worked at Fasken for 33 years. He jokes that the oil business isn’t just on his resume, it’s in his blood.