One of Abilene's economic mainstays has been millions of years in the making. Abilene sits on the edge of a sea that dried up millions of years ago.
Geologists call the area the Eastern Shelf of the Permian Basin.
The Permian Sea, an ecosystem rich in algae, eventually dried up after eons of dirt, sand, rock and other muck settled to the bottom, covering the algae. Under enormous pressure from the rocks above, the algae fermented into billions of barrels of West Texas Intermediate-grade oil, the U.S. benchmark crude, and waited to be found. And it's a sore spot with oil producers. The show ran during the height of an oil boom, painting oilmen as fabulously wealthy. Yet oil producers are a practical lot, acknowledging they deal in a supply and consumption-sensitive commodity, and will say it's not really a matter of how cheap their product is on any given day that disturbs them.