Recently Lisa posted some photos of what resource extraction looks like. I thought I would show a different side of this phenomenon: what an oil bust looks like. I grew up in the Middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma. The area has been through two oil booms, one in the 1920s and one in the 60s through the 80s.
But with any energy boom eventually comes the energy bust. Here are some photos I took showing what a community looks like if its economy is disproportionately based on oil and the oil companies leave. I’m not a particularly good photographer, so these aren’t artistically impressive, but they capture what the area looks like now.
Oil wells that were built in the 1980s and didn’t get installed before the bust can be seen sitting around on empty lots, slowly rusting. This picture is from Bartlesville, which was the main headquarters of Phillips oil before Phillips merged with Conoco and they moved their headquarters to Houston.
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I’m surprised no one has tried to sell them for scrap yet. I don’t know if they’re still technically owned by Phillips or not.
Many oil wells that were in use at one time now sit motionless:
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Because of high oil prices in the last few years, some oil wells have been put back in production; I just got back from Oklahoma and it was the first time since I was a kid that I could look across pastures and see oil wells actually pumping.
Pipes crisscross the landscape, slowly tumbling downhill from lack of maintenance:
When they get old and rusty enough they start breaking apart, leaving jagged edges that can lead to exciting trips to the doctor to get tetanus shots.
An old oil tank:
I presume it will sit there forever. I don’t know how it got dented.
In an energy bust, real estate prices plummet. If there aren’t many other industries in the area, there’s no way to attract buyers, and houses flood the market as people move looking for work. Sometimes they board up the houses before they leave:
Other times they just leave them, not even bothering to board them up:
Families that became wealthy from oil lose their fortunes. The house below was owned by an Osage Indian family in the 1920s; they became wealthy because the Osage tribe retained mineral rights and got royalties from the oil companies. When the oil bust hit, they lost everything. Their house sits in the middle of a pasture that requires crossing a creek and walking through brush to get to, and slowly crumbles:
Downtowns die and the buildings sit empty and deteriorate over time:
Towns don’t have enough children to run independent schools, so rural school districts consolidate, sending kids from some towns to school at others and closing the schools that are no longer used. This school was sold to a person who turned it into, at various times, a bed and breakfast, internet cafe, and beer-only bar:
Ponca City, 30 miles west of where I grew up, is centered around the Conoco refinery plant, but as with Bartlesville, has faced hard times since the Conoco-Phillips headquarters moved to Houston. One large neighborhood started having weird sludge ooze into basements and yards, which turned out to be pollution from the refinery. The company bought out all the homeowners, tore down the houses, and sold the site cheaply to the city (providing a nice tax write-off!). The city put up a pavilion and calls it a park. You can see the refinery in the background:
I never see anybody at the park. Conoco is planning to tear down a lot of its old administrative buildings so it doesn’t have to pay insurance or maintenance costs, meaning there will be even more large swaths of empty land.
On the other hand, people scavenged as much stuff as possible. These tanks make good cellars; you dig them into a hillside where you can use the door but be mostly underground, providing a safe place during tornados (we have lots of them). We had one of these cellars as a kid:
So there you go: a little photo essay of what an oil bust looks like.
