This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part one of a four-part series.

Jose Gonzalez* wore no mask, despite the toxic chemicals he worked with in the oilfield.

"One leak, and no one will hear from you again," he said.

He shrugged. At 31, with three children at home, he faced constant risks in his job as a truck driver in the Permian Basin, both from the chemicals and the relentless pace of the roads where he and other drivers pull 24-hour shifts driving the ingredients and products of fracking — sand, cement, fracking fluid, produced water, oil — from wellhead to storage depot and back again. It didn’t pay, he said, “to think too deeply about the danger.”

The Permian Basin, a region spanning west Texas and eastern New Mexico, is the once and future heart of the greatest oil and gas boom in American history, a frenzy of production triggered by the introduction of new technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling in the 2010s.

The boom has marked a return to prominence — and prosperity — for a region whose resources once helped the Allies win World War II but that was abandoned by major oil companies decades later amid the great bust of the 1980s.

Once-moribund Permian oil production approximately tripled between 2010 and 2024, making the region the source of 47 percent of U.S. output, or just under half. Meanwhile, gas production, which largely fuels electric power plants and is used to make plastics and chemicals, has nearly doubled.

For President Trump and Texas's Republican leadership, that outflow offers a prospect of American “energy dominance.” State and federal officials are seeking to amplify the boom even further with promises to “unleash American energy” by cutting climate regulations, speeding up permits of new wells and pipelines, and greenlighting facilities to ship U.S. natural gas overseas.

“President Trump will treat oil and natural gas as an asset, not a liability, and domestic energy production and jobs will be prioritized,” Todd Staples, head of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, told reporters in January.

But the push to bolster fossil fuel production is heightening concerns among oilfield workers and first responders about the mounting dangers facing workers and Permian residents. The region's prospering oil industry is all too frequently shadowed by injury and death: About 30 Texas workers per year (or more than two per month) die of poison gas, explosions, blunt force trauma or vehicle crashes. In October, a Permian Basin worker was engulfed in flames. In December, another was killed by flying debris after a pressure valve explosion.

The death toll is higher still on the region’s roads, where drivers like Gonzalez race their oilfield cargo back and forth on long shifts. Crashes accounted for two-thirds of oil worker deaths in 2023, according to federal data. But it’s not only truckers who are at risk: The roads have also become more dangerous for the populations of the towns they race through.

In 2023, according to the state Department of Transportation, someone died every day on the Permian’s highways — the result of a staggering 73 crashes per day, which left more than two people seriously injured for every one killed.

That year, more than 1,000 people died on the highways of all of Texas’s oil-producing regions — making the roads among the most dangerous in the country and exceeding the death toll faced by the U.S. military in its bloodiest year in Iraq. Permian crashes were twice as likely to be fatal as those in the rest of Texas.

Out in the Permian — where everyone is up too early, in bed too late, and working under constant stress — Gonzalez told The Hill “accidents are our daily bread.” Between 2010 and 2023, the number of deaths on the region’s roads more than doubled.

The rise in fatalities has come alongside a steep increase in oil production that has brought a flood of new fossil fuel workers to the Permian and revitalized its economy. Before the boom, the region had been in decades-long decline following the 1980s bust, when oil majors like Exxon and Shell departed........

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