Landman - Revisited

Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal had a story by Benoit Morenne in their Arts & Culture / Television section of the paper titled I’ve Never Been Tied to a Chair: Oil Workers Mystified by New TV Show about Paramount’s Landman. (Obviously the story was meant to satisfy the “Television” part, since the TV show ‘Landman’ includes no “Art” or Culture.”)

Mr. Morenne quoted several young Landmen, including my nephew, RobRoy McDonald, who I consider to be one of the better independent Landmen in Midland, except for maybe his brother Turk. However, I was disappointed that some of the youngsters being interviewed gave the impression that a Landman’s job is to sit in their office and play with spreadsheets, or as one youngster described, “We call each other spreadsheet monkeys.” My response to that is, “Let go of your fucking banana and get out in the field and make something happen!”

Get Your Hands Dirty!

One of my biggest complaints about the young professionals (engineers, geologists, and landmen) we would hire out of school was that all they wanted to do was sit in the office and play on their computers, building spreadsheets and power point presentations. Don’t get me started on power point presentations – God knows how much time and energy was wasted on building power point presentations, and most of them were “All hat and no cattle,” they looked slick, but the content sucked.

To address the problem, I would make our young professionals get off their asses, go out to the field and get their hands dirty. Our young geologists would go to the well site and examine rock cuttings and smell the hydrocarbons in the rock while the well was being drilled. Our young engineers would go to the wellsite during a frac job and witness the large pump trucks pump millions of gallons of water and sand down the wellbore to fracture the rock formation two miles below the surface, which allowed thousands of barrels of oil, natural gas, and salt water to flow up the wellbore to the surface. Our young landmen would go to the courthouse to check records and determine mineral ownership, negotiate oil & gas leases, and meet with landowners to settle surface damages and purchase right-of-way for roads and pipelines.

At first they would complain that they had gone to college so they wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty, but after spending some time in the field, they came to appreciate that dirty hands build better spreadsheets and power point presentations!

So, let’s bring this back to Billy Bob’s character, Tommy Norris, in Paramount’s Landman. Let’s assume that Tommy started his career as a Landman, and the character we see in the TV show had advanced his career beyond everyday land work. Now, he was responsible for making things happen – getting wells drilled, solving problems with landowners (including the cartel), negotiating farmouts (to be discussed later in this story), and evaluating the company’s investments. In fact, in one of the final shows of the first season, Tommy was promoted to President of the company. Speaking from experience, Landmen do not get that opportunity unless they were willing to get their ass out of their office and get their hands dirty – and the Tommy Norris character was definitely willing to get his hands dirty!

The Oil Field is a Dangerous Place

The same day I read the WSJ article mentioned above, I came across an article in Midland’s local newspaper, the Midland Reporter Telegram, about an incident that occurred during a hydraulic fracturing operation (“frac job”) on Permian Resources’ Guthrie State D 132H well in Reeves County, TX. It was reported that a rupture of a pressurized device during the frac job led to the accident that killed one individual, injured a second victim who was flown to Odessa to be treated for an arm injury, and a third victim was treated for minor injuries. The article also reported that this was the second oilfield related fatality in the past two months – a man was killed while working on a pipeline when a high-pressure valve failed, the cause was yet to be determined.

If you watched the first few episodes of Landman, then the oilfield accidents described above may sound familiar. Yes, it is a TV show meant to entertain, but its depiction of the oilfield as a dangerous place is all too real.

One danger that Landman has not brought attention to is hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas. You may have noticed that the oilfield workers wear a small yellow box attached to their shirts while working on the wellsite. Those yellow boxes are H2S gas detectors. In the Permian Basin, it is very common for H2S gas to be associated with the crude oil and natural gas produced from the wells. H2S gas is extremely lethal and, if you are exposed to a high concentration of the gas, it can kill you before you can identify its “rotten egg” smell.

In February 1975, one of the worst oilfield tragedies occurred in Denver City, TX, a small town about 90 miles northwest of Midland, when H2S gas escaped from a leak in a ruptured pipeline, killing a family of eight and an oilfield worker who went to check on the leak. When the volunteer firemen arrived at the family’s home, they found seven of the victims in a car and a pickup with the engines running, the eighth victim was lying on the ground nearby. Apparently, the family had attempted to escape, still wearing pajamas, before being overcome by the toxic gas. The oilfield worker, the ninth victim, was found in his pickup, crashed in a ditch beside the road.

However, the most dangerous thing in the oilfield is that big oilfield truck hauling ass down a two-lane country road with a driver, who barely passed his drug test, thinking about the barmaid that he’s going to hook up with when he gets off work, and the son-of-a-bitch swerves into your lane… OSHA reported that in 2022, oilfield truck accidents accounted for over half of all oilfield fatalities, and the oil patch accounted for one in four of all roadway deaths in Texas!

Drug Tests

Speaking of drug tests…

A friend of mine was the HR manager for a drilling contractor. For those of you not familiar with the oilfield, drilling contractors are the companies that own the drilling rigs used to drill oil & gas wells, and they employee the people who work on their drilling rigs. The exploration & production (E&P) companies, like the companies I worked for, hire drilling contractors to drill their wells. As you might expect, working on a drilling rig is physically demanding and dangerous, it is a male dominated profession, and the workers are properly referred to as “roughnecks.”

Roughnecks are well paid, as are almost all jobs in the oilfield; however, my HR friend told me that her biggest hurdle in hiring roughnecks was getting applicants who could pass a drug test. She said that it was even more difficult when they moved from drug testing urine samples to testing hair samples. Apparently, it was much easier to cheat a urine test than a hair test – in fact, she said that some applicants would immediately turn and walk out the door upon learning that the drug test would require a hair sample.

As an example of how an applicant cheated on a urine test, she said that one time a male applicant was standing at the urinal, peeing in the bottle, while two of her male employees supervised to make sure the sample was legitimate. One her employees signaled her come over to the urinal. When she got to the urinal, she noticed that the applicant was holding a black penis while peeing in the bottle, which seemed strange since the applicant was a white guy. She asked the applicant why he had a black penis, and he explained that when he went to buy a “urinator” all they had left was a black “penis.”

Cheating on a drug test is one thing, but everyone knows you can’t coach stupid!

Hot & Crazy!

The other day, one of my golf buddies told me that he stopped watching Landman because he didn’t like Tommy’s wife, Angela (Ali Larter), and his daughter, Aynsley (Michelle Randolph). I was stunned, almost speechless, but replied, “Are you fucking gay? Those two women are hot, they’re the main reason why I’m watching the show!” Finally, he admitted that he didn’t like the two women because he thought they were bat shit crazy and that a real man wouldn’t put up with their bullshit. I couldn’t disagree with that, but every now and then every man finds himself at the top end of the “Hot & Crazy Matrix!”

Here’s the link to the Hot & Crazy Matrix for the initiated:

Obviously, Taylor Sheridan, the creator of the TV shows Yellowstone and Landman understands the “Hot & Crazy Matrix.” Not only did he create the Angela and Aynsley characters in Landman, but he also created the infamous Beth Dutton character in Yellowstone. You can’t get Hotter & Crazier than those three women!

Let’s face it, there’s lots of money in the oil & gas business, and money attracts women, especially hot & crazy women. So, yes, there are plenty of Angela and Aynsley wannabes in Midland, Dallas, Houston, and all the other oil towns around the world.

Angela said it best when she was explaining the “facts of life” to her daughter while they tightened their cute little “money makers” on the Stairmaster:

“I’m never going to work a day in my life, no matter what. My only job is to make my man happy. My man will buy me the things that make me happy and take me to the places that make me happy, and I will reward him with sex. That’s the way the world works. Throw in an occasional blow job and you’ve got the world by the short and curlies.”

Of course, like every hot & crazy woman, Angela was worried about turning into a GMILF! What the hell is a GMILF? As she explained to Tommy, “I’m aging out of being a “cougar” and becoming a Grandmother I’d Like to Fuck!”

However, I must credit Beth Dutton with the most succinct statement of the “facts of life” for all women, whether they are cougars or GMILFs, when she told a woman who had just been treated badly by her husband, “Honey, you don’t have to put up with his shit, after all, you own 50% of the money and 100% of the pussy.”

I get it, some people might find “Hot & Crazy” offensive, but what can I say, sometimes the truth is offensive.

Postscript

Let me end this with a couple of comments to clarify some of the things you may have seen or heard while watching Landman.

First, there are no strip clubs in Midland. That’s not to say that there’s not plenty of places to find trouble in Midland if you look hard enough, but the city is very proud of its reputation that “You raise your family in Midland, and you raise hell in Odessa.” On the other hand, Odessa does have three strip clubs – not that I’ve frequented them, but I know people who have – Jaguars Club, Ricks Cabaret, and PT’s Showtime. I can’t vouch for the entertainment at any of these clubs, but I can say that one of my young engineers rented his spare bedroom to a couple of Jaguar strippers and he seemed to be very pleased with the situation.

Second, there was a scene in Episode #10 when Tommy called Rebecca, the young and aggressive big city attorney, to ask her to meet him at a remote location in the oilfield to discuss a deal they were working on. Rebecca was worried that Tommy may have had bad intentions toward her, which was why he wanted to meet at a remote location, so she informed him that she had a concealed carry permit. Tommy laughed and responded, “You don’t need a license to carry a concealed gun in this state. That’s why everybody waves at each other when they’re driving, because they’re armed.”

He's correct that most of the people in West Texas and Southeast New Mexico carry guns in their vehicles. After all, it would be stupid to get stuck out in the middle of nowhere and not have water and a gun in your possession. He’s also correct that when people are driving on two-lane county roads, they acknowledge the driver in the oncoming vehicle by raising their index finger off the steering wheel. They don’t “wave,” that would be gay! Just be sure to raise your index finger and not your middle finger because the other guy probably has a gun, and you don’t want your family visiting one of those little crosses planted on the side the road with your name on it.

The End

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