Drill rigs towered in dormant clusters along the main highway through Odessa, Texas. The bartender at a popular oil country bar complained of a noticeable slowdown. Workers in stained shirts from the nearby oil fields winced at the high price of diesel.
“I’m not feeling good about $5.39,” said Wesley Stacey, who works for a drill pipe rental company, as he filled his pickup and three red gasoline canisters on Thursday morning.
A surge in oil prices, amid the war in the Middle East, has rattled world markets and driven up the cost of gas. But in the Permian Basin, the heart of Texas oil country, few believe that the boom times will return any time soon.
Mr. Stacey, 37, said he had heard from friends, including those who left in recent years given low oil prices and fewer jobs, asking if now was a good time to look for work in the Permian again. He tells them to think twice.
“I’m saying, ‘Don’t come back right now,’” he said. “No one knows what’s going to happen.”
In interviews this week in the twin oil cities of Odessa and Midland, local officials, company executives and oil field workers said that the sudden price surge, the slow and expensive process of drilling new wells and the Trump administration’s promise to push down oil prices in the future had tempered discussions of ramping up production. For now, caution is winning out over expansion.
On Friday, a closely watched count of drilling rigs compiled by Baker Hughes, a global oil field services company, showed that the number of drilling rigs in Texas had dropped by one over the past week.
“Nobody does anything on a whim,” said Kirk Edwards, the president of Latigo Petroleum, an Odessa-based company with oil and natural gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma. “It takes months to get a well planned and drilled and completed, and then online.”
But the price of oil, which is set on a global market, can swing rapidly and has risen sharply since the United States and Israel began airstrikes on Iran last month. Iran responded with attacks on oil and gas infrastructure around the Persian Gulf and on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz that carry about 20 percent of the world’s oil.
Until the war started, the Permian Basin was adjusting to a period of low global oil prices. Dozens of drilling rigs were taken off-line and thousands of people lost their jobs, Mr. Edwards said.
“Last year was a terrible year for the Permian,” he said. “Everybody is asking us to ‘drill, baby, drill,’” he said, “but the people are not here right now.”
Outside his Odessa office, a pump jack bobbed up and down next to a housing development and not far from a pair of La Quinta hotels built to accommodate the workers who fly in from around the country for weeks or months at a time.
The local economy runs on the oil and gas industry. All along Interstate 20, which links Midland to Odessa, are companies that prop up the oil fields: equipment rentals, parts suppliers, R.V. parks and extended stay hotels, and the dense temporary housing setups known as “man camps” that house transient workers.
More apparent than any signs of a boom were the scars from recent market downturns: a handful of stacked rigs that had not been used since the pandemic; a sign for a dining hall standing in an empty lot that had been a sprawling man camp.
City leaders have closely watched the price of oil for signs of increased activity. So far there has been little to speak of, said Cal Hendrick, the mayor of Odessa.
“We’ve seen no increase in anything, quite frankly, except at the gas pump,” Mr. Hendrick said. “Everyone is in a wait-and-see attitude. Is this going to be a hiccup, short-term, 30-day problem? Or is it a six-month, one-year, five-year, ten-year issue?”
Workers who have spent any time in the Permian Basin have lived through several booms and busts before.
Ivan Maldonado, a 29-year-old diesel mechanic who moved to Midland from the Rio Grande Valley seven years ago, said that higher oil prices spur hiring and a feeling of job security, but he added that the current spike might not last long enough to do either. “There’s a lot of people who think that it’s temporary,” he said, standing next to his work truck as the price on the gas pump ticked up.
Despite sitting on vast reserves of oil, gas stations in the Permian often have higher prices than in other parts of Texas because the oil must be refined elsewhere and brought back. Still, Mr. Maldonado texted his friend in disbelief after seeing how much it cost to fill the truck’s tank about halfway: $140.
Across the arid urban landscape, at J&W Services, workers drove forklifts through rows of outdoor shelves holding oil field parts. The Midland company, which manufactures, rents and services products for drilling and exploration, works with large, publicly traded oil companies as well as those that are privately held, said James Power, the director of business operations. None of those firms were ramping up production.
As a result, J&W Services is sticking to its forecasts and planning that predated the Middle East conflict.
“The boom-and-bust cycles, trying to ride the high and not really knowing when the bottom is going to drop out, those days are really behind us,” Mr. Power said, sitting in his office. “So many people got burned in the past.”
At the Bar in downtown Midland, oil field company logos tile the ceiling, a towering taxidermied bear stands in a frozen snarl in a corner and a lighted sign with cursive letters near the bar captures the ethos of the clientele: “Drill, baby, drill.”
But on Thursday at happy hour, the focus was on college basketball on the TV rather than on any new oil field prospects. A 40-year-old regular at the bar, drinking a beer and a “mind eraser” — vodka, Kahlua, soda water — said he had lived through three busts since he began working in the oil fields in 2006.
The regular, who gave his name only as Rob, said he cherished the advice he received from an oil field veteran back when he was starting out in the Permian: Save your money.
J. David Goodman is the Texas bureau chief for The Times, based in Houston.
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