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251.9 million years ago, our planet Earth faced its most devastating extinction event, leaving behind its most colossal oil deposits where there was the most life to take: the nutrient-rich soils of Paleozoic coastal basins like those in present-day Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Permian Basin of West Texas. As a result of epochs of geological precarity, the area of Texas which borders Mexico and New Mexico manifests a stark landscape of blue expanse atop yellow, yucca-crisp hills which often remain long uninterrupted—save for the oil rigs and sparsely-populated towns once reliant on their …