Mike Conaway: “One of the things that it was a bit counterintuitive in west Texas, there was no bumper sticker. The old business has…”

“One of the things that it was a bit counterintuitive in west Texas, there was no bumper sticker. The old business has gone through a series of booms and busts that, I suspect are typical in most businesses, but they are pretty dramatic in the oil business. In 1986 there was a bust. In the early 1990s there was a bust. Late 1990s there was a bust. In the early 1990s, when the price of crude oil dropped, there was this bumper sticker that said Dear Lord, give us one more boom and we promise not to screw it up. And then we had the real dramatic bust in 1998-1999 where the price of crude went to 10 bucks a barrel for sweet crude, and even less than that for sour crude. Things were really grim. Thousands and thousands of jobs pushed out of the oil business. And so when the prices began to rise, in the early 2000s, and when they began to push past 40 and 50 bucks a barrel and into those ranges there was a real lag in the up tick in activity.”