The Petroleum Museum: Reading the Rock

The building on Interstate Twenty West in Midland covers sixty thousand square feet, which seems like a lot of space to dedicate to the story of oil. It is not too much space. The story of the Permian Basin petroleum industry is not a short story.

The Permian Basin Petroleum Museum was founded in nineteen sixty-eight by a group of five hundred people, under the leadership of George T. Abell and the Abell-Hangar Foundation, and opened its doors to the public in nineteen seventy-five. The exhibits begin with geology: the Permian period sea floor, the ancient reefs, the coral communities and marine life whose compressed remains became the oil. They move through the technology of the industry, the progression from cable-tool drilling to rotary rigs to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. There is an outdoor exhibit of large oil field machinery that does not fit inside.

The museum maintains a research library with donated material related to the history of Permian Basin oil production, one of the largest collections of petroleum-related archival material in the region. Its Petroleum Hall of Fame recognizes more than a hundred and forty men and women who shaped the industry here.

Among the other exhibits is a collection of racing cars designed by Jim Hall, the Midland-based engineer whose Chaparral cars pioneered aerodynamic downforce technology in the nineteen sixties and seventies, a story from this region that has nothing to do with oil except that they both required understanding physics and moving fast.

The museum is the institutional memory of an industry that shaped everything within a hundred miles of here: the towns, the roads, the population movements, the fortunes made and lost. It is worth an hour if you want to understand why this part of Texas is the way it is.