26 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Spring 2019 TheCoastalBend.com men were President of the United States, George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, and his son, George W. Bush, from 2001 to 2009—both politicians wholly financed by wealthy Texas oil barons. During their tenures, oil production in Texas declined by over 70 million barrels, and the peak U.S. retail price for gasoline was $4.11 in July 2008, as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were boiling over and the overinflated bubble that was the international credit market was on the verge of bursting. Driv- ers of light trucks and full-sized SUV’s may recall pay-at-pump credit card authoriza- tions being raised from $75 to $100, but even that amount would not fill a Subur- ban at over four bucks a gallon. Two genuine innovators in the Texas oil and gas industries, unknown compared to the Hunt’s aka J.R. Ewing’s of pedestrian lore, integrated the technological innova- tions that have led to America’s new lead- ership role in oil and gas production. C.C. “Charlie” Winn of Eagle Pass and Corpus Christi implemented horizontal drilling in the 1980’s and was credited with saving the Texas oil industry at the time. Borne of horizontal drilling was hydraulic frack- ing, implemented by George Mitchell of Houston and Galveston. This effective but controversial new drilling method opened up huge pockets of oil and gas within deep layers of underground rock and sediment formations. As fracking began proving its potential in extracting previously un- reachable oil and gas in 2009-2010, the decision had to be made by the Environ- mental Protection Agency (EPA) of the newly elected Democratic administration as to whether to allow it—and their liberal political base hated it. Fracking requires the injection of over five million gallons of water, com- bined with 1,800 tons of sand and 100 tons of gelling additives, per well, and emits thousands of pounds of hydrocar- bons that traditional wells do not. Let’s not forget seismic activity in areas of the country where earthquakes could only be caused by fracking. Oklahoma is the most extreme case, where 41 earthquakes over magnitude three were measured in 2010, spiking to 903 in 2015, and settling back down to about 300 in 2017. Fracking is lit- erally hollowing out the earth from under- neath the surface in Oklahoma—but this is a calculated cost of doing business that we as a country have fully accepted, starting with President Barack Obama. “There’s not a drop of anything that comes out of the ground in this country that is not fully controlled by the EPA,” said the late, great wildcatter, Charlie Winn in 2007. That accepted, it could have only been a calculated political decision for the president labeled “anti- drilling, anti-oil” by his opponents, for the EPA of 2009 to 2017 to allow the level of fracking that has led to record high American drilling production, re- cord low oil imports and dependence on countries that, yes, hate us (Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela), and that was urgently needed as the U.S. was experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Crude oil production in Texas tripled from 356 million barrels in 2010 to over a billion barrels in 2015, to the state’s all-time record production year in 2018, deliv- ering 1.27 billion barrels to the Ameri- can—and world—energy markets. Yes, world energy markets, as the 40-year ban on crude oil exports was officially lifted in 2015 through an act of the Republican congress and signed by the Democratic president. In fact, the first tanker ship loaded with American crude oil destined for international mar- kets departed the Port of Corpus Christi on January 1, 2016, the first day the ban was officially lifted. In the three years since, Corpus Christi has maintained its status as the number one exporter of oil and gas products from the U.S.—and it’s not even close. O ne hundred million years ago, what is now the Texas gulf coastline, ran roughly from south of Dallas, bending to the southwest and run- ning south of Austin and San Antonio, then turning westward toward Eagle Pass and into the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico. This is where the Eagle Ford Shale rock formation exists now, thou- sands of feet underground, and where mineral reserves have been known to exist for decades—but the technology and efficiency of process did not ex- ist for what are called “unconvention- al drilling techniques,” aka hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, until the late 2000’s. Because the shale bed, which averages 250 feet in thickness running from 4,000 to 12,000 feet underground, is rich in highly brittle carbonate (fos- silized Stone Age sea creatures), it is easy to “frack.” Using this technology, the Eagle Ford Shale play is estimated to hold three billion barrels of crude oil reserves, and 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—that’s a lot of gas—and be-