When it was $65 a barrel, crude was already going missing from Permian oil fields at record rates. Now that it’s almost $100, authorities are bracing for more pain.
Ella Feldman
9–12 minutes
The Martin County Sheriff’s Office sits along Interstate 20 in West Texas, a stretch of dusty plains and sunbaked highways that could almost be the setting for a Mad Max movie. It’s sparse—oil wells outnumber people—but that doesn’t mean it’s quiet for Sheriff Randy Cozart. At least once a week, someone calls to say their oil field has been robbed: trailers missing, copper wire yanked and, most of all, crude stolen. In total, some 500 barrels’ worth of oil go missing in Martin County every week, Cozart estimates. At last year’s average of $65 a barrel, that’s an annual loss of roughly $1.7 million. At today’s war-heightened prices, it would be far more.
A similar scene is playing out in dozens of other counties across the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, the world’s most prolific shale oil patch. Law enforcement officials, legislators, trade groups and energy producers say people are stealing more crude than ever, often laundering it into local supply chains or driving it to Mexico to offload it. “Where there’s money, there’s crime,” says Cozart, who, like many in the region, once worked in the oil industry himself. “And there’s lots of money in oil right now.”
Sheriff Cozart.Photographer: Ariana Gomez for Bloomberg Businessweek
Pumpjacks in Martin County.Photographer: Ariana Gomez for Bloomberg Businessweek
More than 40% of oil executives surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas this past fall said their operations had been affected by theft during the previous year, with several dozen petroleum-product arrests now made annually, up from perhaps a single arrest per year a decade ago, Texas Department of Public Safety records show.
Some estimate annual oil theft in Texas at around $1 billion. Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, an industry advocacy group based in Austin, calculates it’s more than double that—and that $2 billion figure doesn’t cover thefts in the New Mexico portion of the Permian, a smaller but rapidly expanding corner of the basin. As the situation worsens, state lawmakers, regulators and even the FBI have taken notice.
“The old joke in the oil field used to be that if it wasn’t bolted down, it would get stolen,” says Michael Lozano, who runs government affairs and communications for the Permian Basin Petroleum Association. “Now they’re unscrewing the bolts, and they’re stealing those too.”
Opportunistic equipment thefts have long dogged oil fields, which are often located in remote areas and left unmanned for weeks on end. But in recent years, crude theft has become more sophisticated and frequent, according to producers, sheriffs and local officials. Many perpetrators here are more brazen than those who stealthily tap pipelines, a tactic that’s hurt oil and gas producers in Mexico and Russia. (Though some pipeline tapping also happens in the US.)
Oil equipment and copper wires taken as evidence by the Martin County Sheriff’s Office in West Texas.Photographer: Ariana Gomez for Bloomberg Businessweek
Today’s Permian Basin thieves might instead connect vacuum trucks to storage tanks in broad daylight and siphon it out, sometimes covering their license plates or swapping vehicles to evade law enforcement, authorities say. In one popular ploy, they pose as waste haulers, which companies hire to remove toxic water from storage tanks, then make off with the crude. Old-time schemes, like one discovered in 1962 where independent oil operators across Texas were drilling wells at a slant to steal crude from their neighbors, seem quaint by comparison.
Skilled perpetrators can often hide in plain sight, syncing up their hits with an oil field’s busiest hours. That way they can blend in with the parade of trucks that are authorized to pick up oil. “We’ve got oil probably every quarter-mile,” says Lieutenant Richard Dickson, who works in the sheriff’s office in Texas’ Ector County. He says calls about industry theft come in almost daily, though he estimates the department solves only about 2%. “It’s more than law enforcement or oilfield security people can keep up with.” Carlyle Mehling, founder and chief executive officer of Guardian Security and Water Transfer, says demand for her on-the-ground guards and surveillance cameras is surging. “Business has only gone up,” says Mehling, whose firm is based in the Permian’s de facto capital, Midland, Texas.
Experts say there’s no single reason why it’s getting worse. For one, the Permian is pumping more oil and gas than ever before. (Natural gas, another basin product, isn’t a common theft target because, well, it’s a gas.) Over the past decade, the region more than tripled its oil output thanks to the expansion of fracking, transforming the US into the world’s reigning crude producer.
The fracking boom has made a lot of people in the region very rich, but not everyone has gone along for the ride. Even those fortunate enough to collect a high oil-industry salary aren’t guaranteed work forever: Over the past decade, the US oil and gas industry has lost roughly 40% of its jobs, due in part to efficiency gains like robots replacing humans on rigs. When jobs are hard to come by, oilfield theft is a way to make a quick buck. “From a cost-benefit analysis, the risk is low,” says John Smietana, a senior lecturer in criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas Permian Basin. There aren’t a lot of people in the region, meaning perpetrators can count on getting in and out unseen.
To dispose of the stolen oil, thieves sometimes work with saltwater disposal facilities, which legally sell crude recovered from wastewater, to launder stolen barrels into local supply chains, law enforcement says. Some thieves might even buy a depleted oil lease and pretend they’ve pumped the hijacked crude themselves. Smietana, who served in the US Border Patrol before his career in academia, says the stolen oil is also sometimes driven south of the border for resale. (Real-life reports of cartel-linked oil rustling inspired the latest season of Paramount+’s hit show Landman.)
A worker lays pipe for an oil pipeline in Martin County.Photographer: Ariana Gomez for Bloomberg Businessweek
In December, dozens of law enforcement officers, legislators and members of the oil and gas industry gathered in New Mexico for a discussion on oilfield theft, which Attorney General Raúl Torrez called a “productive first step for my team and I to address a long-standing problem.” Meanwhile, Texas is trying to legislate a solution. Last summer the state enacted laws to better understand and deter the thefts. The state also created a task force to study theft under the Railroad Commission of Texas, the body that regulates the energy sector. It’s required to deliver a report with legislative recommendations by December.
Part of the mandate is to determine exactly how much money oil theft is costing the region, says Jim Wright, chairman of the Railroad Commission. After all, you can’t effectively combat a problem until you know how big it is. And, as Wright now realizes, it’s big. “I’ve known theft has existed in the oil field, like anywhere else, but I was not aware of the magnitude until this last legislative session,” he says. “It’s shocking that it could possibly be at that magnitude.”
The cost is often borne by producers, because missing barrels aren’t typically covered by insurance, says Cole Harrison, owner of Fiesta Energy LLC, which took a $15,000 loss last year when someone drained one of its storage tanks. “It’s hard to prove,” he says. “If a tank battery blew up, or something like that, that’s obviously much easier for them to see and quantify.”
The FBI, which formed a task force to fight mostly equipment thefts in Permian oil fields in 2008, refocused its efforts on rising crude theft about three years ago, says Supervisory Special Agent Briton Goad, who coordinates the FBI team that also includes state and local partners. In 2023 the federal agency also began collecting data on the phenomenon, finding the number of barrels stolen was actually down in 2025 from the prior two years. Goad attributes that progress to the growing “counterpunch” of focused law enforcement, regulators and legislators. (Lower average prices in 2025 compared to recent years probably also helped, though the conflict now raging in the Middle East, which is driving up crude prices, might bring that relief to an end.)
He concedes that the agency’s data, which suggests the problem is much smaller than others say, has limitations: It relies on self-reporting and doesn’t include many of the Permian’s smallest operators, “the ones that are actually impacted the most,” Goad says. “The data is only as good as the people putting it in,” he adds. “We don’t always know what we don’t know.”
Mehling, founder and CEO of Guardian Security and Water Transfer.Photographer: Ariana Gomez for Bloomberg Businessweek
Back in Martin County, Chief Deputy Daniel Subia, who investigates oil theft for Cozart’s office, is grateful for the recent interest from lawmakers and federal agents—he just wishes it made more of a difference on the ground. “The federal level will say, ‘We’re going to send FBI agents to combat oilfield theft.’ And the state will say, ‘We’re opening a new oil theft task force.’” But the bulk of the work ends up falling back on the same local law enforcement members and security guards that were already trying to combat the problem, he says. “It’s the same people that are doing it, with no extra resources.”
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