THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Spring 2019 25 TheCoastalBend.com diate, is the most valuable energy com- modity on earth, and 20 of the top 100 oil fields in North America are located in the basin. Up until the late 1940’s, natural gas (referred to as ‘casinghead gas’) was considered little more than a by-product of oil drilling. In 1947 the Texas Railroad Commission began taking action to con- serve and/or capture natural gas and actually shut down over 2,000 wells for wasting casinghead gas—by the end of the decade, some 150 facilities had been built in Texas to capture natural gas, as its stand-alone value as a fuel started to be recognized across the country. During the 1950’s, in an apparent effort to bolster American influence in the Middle East, oil imports from Saudi Arabia and Iran took hold in the U.S. market—in 1955 overall oil demand in- creased by 7.6% in a single year, while oil imports rose by over 17% at the same time. When demand dropped off in 1958, Middle East imports increased, while drilling permits in Texas were cut in half—this all resulted in the first bust in the state’s oil industry and set the pace for U.S. dependence on foreign oil for the following 55 years. As political strife and hot wars erupt- ed in the Middle East starting in the late 1960’s, the U.S. became subjugated to the demands of Arab kings. In retaliation for U.S. military support of Israel in its 1973 conflicts with multiple Arab countries, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), cut production and refused to sell to five nations including the U.S. The cost of a barrel of crude rose from $3 to $11, and gas lines, rationing and other conservation measures were imposed on American drivers. Two years later, President Gerald R. Ford signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which established the 55-m.p.h. fed- eral speed limit (slowed the country to a snail’s pace), mandated new fuel economy standards (say hello to the Ford Pinto), created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (should have been done 50 years prior), and banned the export of most crude oil varieties by U.S. producers. Drilling in Texas rose dramatically in the late 1960’s and many millionaires were made throughout the state. Produc- tion hovered in the one billion barrels per year level from 1966 to 1978, peak- ing in 1973 at 1.257 billion. The turn for the worst, however, for the Texas oil in- dustry coincided with the second shock to the national energy economy in 1979, with the Islamic Revolution and the fall of the Shah of Iran, a close ally of the U.S. and Britain, which together controlled Persian oil production for most of the pri- or 78 years. Over the following 30 years, crude oil production for both onshore and offshore wells in Texas fell from 978 million barrels in 1979 to 344 million barrels in 2009, the bottom occurring in 2006 when the state produced only 340 million barrels—quite a fall from grace for the state that defined greatness in American energy production. It should be observed that over this period of three decades of decline in the Texas oil industry, two Texas oil