Moneywise reports:

West Texas is losing roughly a billion dollars in crude oil each year to theft — and the people taking it have gotten good enough that they clone service trucks, launder barrels through brokers and occasionally blow up the pipeline they’re trying to rob.

“It’s like any other commodity,” Jim Wright, chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, told Texas Public Radio. “When the price is high, they just get sexier.”

With oil prices elevated by the Iran war (crude has been trading above $90 a barrel for most of 2026), the economics of oil theft have become more attractive. Oil theft in the Permian Basin is already old news, but what’s different now, as officials say, is that it’s become more organized, more sophisticated, and considerably more dangerous than the opportunistic rustlers of years past.

On a night in March 2025, a pipeline exploded in Reeves County in West Texas. Investigators said the cause was an attempted theft.

Tim Murphy of the Texas Department of Public Safety described the incident in testimony before the Texas House Energy Resources Committee. “They cut into the pipeline and tried to tap directly into the main pipeline,” he said. “It sparked and it blew. They blew up everything in the area, but the pipeline burned for several days”.

The fire was contained before it reached a more populated area or a nearby natural gas pipeline, or it could have been significantly worse.

That incident has become central to how officials describe the changing threat from oil theft. It is no longer just a property crime. Thieves cutting into pressurized pipelines in remote West Texas now pose a genuine danger to workers, nearby communities and the energy infrastructure that supplies nearly half of America’s domestic crude oil. [Continue reading…]