Oil’s new Bible-Thumping, Biden-bashing billionaire

Just a couple years after the price of oil briefly fell below $0, dusty, sweltering Midland, Texas, is a boomtown again. Hotels are at full capacity and there are 50% more rigs dotting the fields surrounding the West Texas city of 140,000, all thanks to crude prices above $100 per barrel. The Black Rifle Coffee shop (think Starbucks for gun aficionados) is bustling, and the wait for a table at Chuy’s Tex-Mex runs about two hours. Inside the 60,000-square-foot headquarters building of Midland’s CrownQuest Operating, chief executive Tim Dunn is relaxing in jeans, sneakers and a golf shirt. He’s surrounded by the three of his sons who work for the family business. Wally, 35, is a geologist; Luke, 42, heads engineering and operations; eldest son Lee, 43, is in business development. It’s a warm environment—the four have a habit of completing one another’s sentences—but when it comes to assessing the energy markets, Dunn père offers cold comfort. “Oil is going to get more expensive,” he says simply. “We are reaching the end of where we can keep increasing supply.”

Still, no one can blame Dunn for the current petroleum shortage. The 66-year-old, who has spent his entire life working in and around Midland’s oilfields, has never stopped drilling, never quit exploring. Since the end of 2019, CrownRock LP, owner of the wells operated by CrownQuest, has doubled its output to 140,000 barrels per day, good for twelfth place among privately owned U.S. oil companies. Incredibly, CrownRock kept four rigs drilling right through the worst of the pandemic downturn. “Two years ago, Wall Street was telling us, ‘We don’t need you, we’re going to run everything off sun and wind and reindeer and unicorns,’” Lee Dunn scoffs. Tim Dunn knew better. He had an unshakable belief that prices wouldn’t stay low for long, and he knew that equipment and workers are cheap when demand dries up. So he kept investing. This sort of persistence by producers like Dunn has led to the trebling of U.S. oil production to 11 million barrels per day in just a decade. “We have blown a big hole in the trade deficit and lowered energy costs for the entire world,” he says.