Texas fracking boom hits hard times after oil price collapse

Global Business

The center of the U.S. oil industry is in Texas, where fracking helped create the 2nd largest state economy in the United States. Twenty months into the oil price collapse the heart of the oil industry is beginning to break.

CCTV America’s Jim Spellman reports from Pleasanton, Texas.

A year ago Pleasanton was a boomtown. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, opened up a huge oil deposit know as the Eagle Ford Shale.

And with the oil came jobs.

Oil field workers were flush with cash and eager to spend, but then oil prices fell from more than $100 a barrel to about $30 a barrel.

The rest of the country began enjoying cheap gas and in Pleasanton the boom went bust.

Jobs went away. Businesses closed. Trailer parks, once packed with oil hands, are now mostly empty.

People here hope that if oil prices come back the jobs will return and breathe new life into Pleasanton Texas.

But it could be several years before oil prices go up significantly.


Economist Adam Perdue on the Texas oil bust

CCTV Americas’s Michelle Makori interviewed Adam Perdue about the oil bust in Texas. Perdue is a research economist of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston’s C. T. Bauer College of Business