On a sunny and hot mid-June day in Big Lake, Texas, more than 100 empty hopper cars stretching farther than the naked eye can see were staged along several miles of track, prepped for a return trip to Illinois and Wisconsin frac sand mines. Twenty miles east in Barnhart, dozens of tank cars loaded with crude oil and destined for Houston-area refineries were stationed on three long tracks as drills maintained their monotonous up-and-down motion at a half-dozen wells operating nearby. The activity visible in west-central Texas is a small part of the big oil boom in the Permian Basin, a crude-rich sedimentary deposit covering a 250-mile-wide, 300-mile-long portion of the Lone Star State and New Mexico. The basin already is home to hundreds of wells and is projected to gain 4,000 more of them by 2016.
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