Liquidity: Privatization and the Rise of Big Water - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 218

CHAPTER 23
Liquidity: Privatization and the Rise of Big Water
“WATER IS THE NEW OIL!”
On nearly every continent, groundwater in aquifers is being drained faster than
the natural rate of recharge
—National Geographic,April 2010
I drained you dry, you boy. If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and
I have a straw and my straw reaches across the room … I drink your milkshake. I
drink it up!
—Daniel C. Plainview,
There Will Be Blood,2007
In 1971 the oil and natural-gas entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens bought a 2,960-acre ranch
along the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle. The Panhandle is a rectangular chunk
of north Texas that juts up into New Mexico and Oklahoma. The ranch was in Roberts
County, a remote area of hills and canyons, prairie grass and mesquite. Although it is
roughly forty times the size of Manhattan, the county had only a few hundred residents.
Some ranched there, but the topography was too rugged for irrigated agriculture. Pick-
ens didn't care about that. He loved the area's scrubby remoteness. He moved a double-
wide trailer onto his property and used it as a getaway. Fueled with cheese, crackers, and
six-packs of Big Orange soda, he'd spend hours with his dogs hunting quail on the prop-
erty, before racing ninety miles back to Amarillo, where he was building Mesa Inc. into
the largest independent oil firm in the world.
In the 1980s, Pickens built a reputation as the country's most fearsome corporate raid-
er. He made hostile bids for companies many times larger than Mesa—including Gulf
Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Unocal—which helped to reconfigure the resource business
and made him a billionaire. His enemies referred to Pickens as a “greenmailer,” and in
1985 Timemagazine depicted him on its cover as a cagey poker player. But over the next
decade Mesa was hobbled by a series of legal battles and business reversals that let it with
a $1.2 billion debt. Pickens fought with nearly everyone around him and underwent two