The Brief keeps Texas voters and political observers up to speed on the most essential coverage of their elected officials, the policies that shape their daily lives and the future of our great state.

The Texas Railroad Commission has announced the 13 members of its newly established task force to stop escalating petroleum thefts in the state. Energy companies have sounded the alarm about ...

A version of this story ran in the November / December 2025 issue. For 15 years, Debrah Linn and her children have raised chickens, miniature donkeys, pet geese, and, more recently, longhorn cattle on ...

An oil boom is in full swing in the Permian Basin in West Texas along with one of its expected but more unwelcome sidekicks — natural gas flaring, according to a new report. Permian Basin producers ...

TYLER, Texas (KLTV) - A trip to the East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore is a trip back in time to the 1930s oil boom. “Oil was everywhere here,” said Olivia Moore, museum director. At the time of ...

Leaking wells have become a scourge on Texas oil fields as the state contends with two overlapping issues: surging numbers of unplugged orphan wells left behind by bankrupt operators, and a growing ...

A Chesapeake Energy drilling site near Big Wells in South Texas uses fracking. The boom in shale gas drilling has created half a million jobs. Hawk Dunlap fought fires and blowouts in oil fields ...

Co-published with Inside Climate News and The Texas Tribune ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around ...

The stench, like rotten eggs smothered in tar, burns my nostrils. “That’s crude oil and methane,” Hawk Dunlap tells me: the smell of a zombie oil well. It’s the scourge that he’s brought me to a ...