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business newsYesterday's TV, Today's Economy: "Dallas"
J.R. Ewing would have really needed his entrpreneurial skills to keep Ewing Oil afloat.
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The family company was already bumping up against some hard realities when the series ended in 1991. Texas oil production peaked at more than 1.2 billion barrels in 1972, and by the 1980s, dry holes and spent wells were commonplace. Meanwhile, prices plunged from almost $40 a barrel in 1981 to less than $11 in 1986, then rarely poked above $20 (except for a spike during during the first Gulf War), till 1999. This year total production might reach about 340 million barrels. Only producers who were relatively debt-free had much hope of surviving, says Hinton. “Any number went belly-up.”
The tough times did provide a glimmer of opportunity, however. By the 1990s, the big oil companies began abandoning Texas, allowing surviving independents to acquire their positions cheaply. Then, around the turn of the century, higher oil prices and two technological breakthroughs brought new life to the patch. Horizontal drilling allowed producers to tap residual oil that conventional methods left behind, and gas deposits in the Fort Worth Basin became exploitable after a driller figured out how to tap the Barnett Shale.
Yet even this brief Golden Age ended last year when natural-gas futures suddenly plunged from more than $12 per million BTUs to less than $4. Now, says Hinton, producers are switching back to oil, mostly in west Texas, where there’s yet another great black hope, the Wolfberry Play.
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Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Of course, even if J.R. did none of those things, it’s possible someone with his savvy and street smarts managed to make a go of it -- maybe by parceling off Southfork’s 200 acres of prime ranchland. In the past 20 years, the area has cemented its position as one of the best and most expensive places in Texas to live. Intact, the ranch and its 5,000-square-foot home might be worth around $2 million, but Jerold Smith of Smith & Smith Realty, LLC in nearby Plano says that one- to three-acre acreages fetch around $300,000 each, and they’re in strong demand given Texas’s surprisingly solid real estate climate.
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