Opinion

In 1924, the Illinois No. 3 well struck oil.

It was glamour and glitz again as Virgin Galactic sent its last space tourists into the heavens this month. Now the company will fade away for two years to build the next generation ship – not here but in Mesa, Arizona.

In 1974, when I was 11, I flushed an apple core down the toilet. You see, my father had remodeled our basement into a family room with a powder room.

Some fathers are entirely too serious. They’re paranoid about their children finding out that they had their own youthful indiscretions and regrettable choices.

I am pleased to join the Permian Basin Centennial celebration. In many ways, it is a celebration of New Mexico’s national, pre-eminent leadership in energy production; its contribution to our energy independence and free world leadership; and a tribute to the men and women who work in the oil fields.

By any standard, in the past decade oil production in New Mexico has attained world-class stature. In 2023, New Mexico was producing about 1.8 million barrels per day (657 million barrels that year) of crude oil, 10 times more than it was producing in 2010, thanks to investments in new fracking technologies. This quantity places New Mexico just about even with the oilrich countries of Mexico, Kazakhstan, and Norway, and slightly above Nigeria and Qatar. If New Mexico were a nation it would rank about 14th in the world in oil production, well above the OPEC countries of Libya, Algeria, and Venezuela. Visionary as they might have been, it seems unlikely that Mary and Martin Yates, thrilled by the gushing black liquid at Illinois #3 in Spring of 1924, could have imagined that exactly one century later their descendants would still be drilling in a New Mexico now producing more oil than Qatar.