Oil, Water, Wind, Sun and Landman

I recently watched Season 1 of Taylor Sheridan's tv series Landman which is about the oil and gas industry in Texas. Season 2 debuted on November 16  on Paramount+.

Credit: https://savingcountrymusic.com/all-songs-artists-featured-on-landman-season-1-running-tab/

It stars Billy Bob Thornton, and beyond the entertainment value, the show (which contains a lot of profanity and racy subplots) also provides a great deal of education about the importance of oil and gas to our way of life today.

Sheridan also confronts some of the issues about balancing the use of fossil fuels with green energy alternatives.

Consider this response from Tommy Norris (Billy Bob's character) to a young left-leaning attorney who is assigned to represent Tommy's company in a liability lawsuit and is unsure if her principles will let her defend a big, bad oil company. 

Tommy drives her out to a wind farm and points up at one of the large turbines.

Source: https://movieweb.com/landman-best-tommy-quotes-billy-bob-thornton/

The fracking process, which has re-energized most oil fields in West Texas, is also highlighted in the show. In fact, without fracking there would not be much oil output in the area around Midland, Texas which today accounts for almost 50% of the crude oil produced in the United States.

Oil and gas drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracking require vast quantities of water.  Each oil well drilled in Texas can require 6 million gallons of water to break open rocks deep in the earth and release oil and natural gas according to the American Geosciences Institute. Some wells use more water than that depending on the geological formations involved.

This sounds like the use of an enormous amount of water resources until it is compared to the amount of water it takes to irrigate a corn crop in the same area. It takes 407 million gallons of water to irrigate 640 acres of corn to bring it from seed to maturity.

What is the economic result of the use of that water resource?  640 acres of corn will produce about $400,000 of revenues.  The same amount of water used in hydraulic fracking could be used to drill enough wells to generate $2.4 billion of oil.

You might also be surprised to learn that only about 15% of the total use of water in the United States is for domestic uses such as drinking, bathing, sanitation, cooking and lawn watering. Most water usage by far is used for crop irrigation (42%) and thermoelectric (34%). The remaining 9% is spread between industrial, livestock, mining and aquaculture.

Credit: https://extension.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/2024-08/az1917-2022.pdf

This data also raises the question of why there was so much attention given to making us use low flow toilets, showers and household appliances (washing machines, dishwashers) that limit water usage?

Thankfully, President Trump understands all of this and issued an executive order in May directing the Department of Energy to rescind the burdensome water rules for American households.

These water standards were essentially useless when looking at overall water usage.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-rescinds-useless-water-pressure-standards/

What is the better use of that precious water resource?  Do we use it for oil and gas production or to irrigate our crops?

The economics suggest that using that water for fracking makes a lot of sense.

Then again, you can't eat oil.  

We still need water for irrigation of our crops.

However, it also takes a lot of energy (almost all of which are fossil fuel based) beyond the water required to get those crops grown and get that food processed and delivered to your table.

It takes an estimated 400 gallons of gasoline equivalents annually to feed each American.  

A report from the Emory University Office of Sustainability Initiatives concluded that it takes about 7.3 units of (primarily) fossil energy to produce one unit of food energy in the U.S. 

The American food supply is almost entirely driven by non-renewable energy sources and producing that food and getting it on the table consumes about 19% of all fossil fuel usage in the United States.

This chart provides some perspective on how that energy use breaks down.

I wrote about it in a blog post in October, "Powering Prosperity",  but it bears repeating.  Energy is what makes any economy go. Without affordable and accessible energy the economy is not going to grow.  We also need it to make our crops grow and to bring them to market. 

Tommy Norris has another conversation later in the show with the young attorney when she been hired by the company to negotiate some oil lease deals and is not not sure she can do it forcefully enough because she questions the morality of the oil industry.

Tommy jumps right in to give her some "perspective".

That perspective is also worthwhile for those who question fracking and its heavy use of water.

Water is a precious resource and we need to protect it and conserve it.  However, we also need oil and other fossil fuels to grow and maintain our way of life.  

We need water but we also need fertile land to grow our food.

Another problem with generating power with renewable sources such as solar and wind is the relatively large land sizes necessary compared to the footprint of traditional or nuclear power plants

This is why it is generally much easier to locate renewable projects in the western U.S. on land that is less fertile, more open and less costly than the East. There are also more sunny days out West.

Source: https://x.com/PaulGaier1/status/1975596222988857535

China is addressing this problem by putting large solar plants on water in order to save the land for farmland and other uses.

The old adage is that oil and water do not mix.  That thinking does not work when it comes to our economy and our future. We need to mix and balance both to our best advantage if we are going to optimize our health and wealth going forward.

We also need to mix and match fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables within our energy strategy without arbitrarily cancelling any option based on anyone's political agenda.