The oilman who brought the Permian Basin back from the dead was eating a Chick-fil-A salad and feeling persecuted. There were countless things Scott Sheffield would rather have been doing than lunching with his lawyer. Like playing tennis, or teaching one of his eleven grandchildren to fly-fish at his New Mexico ranch. Or attending a meeting of the Exxon board of directors, using the wisdom he’d collected over four decades as a chief executive to help guide the energy giant.Not so long ago, the West Texas oil patch was washed up, decades past its glory days. Then, in 2011, Sheffield’s company, Pioneer Natural Resources, figured out the trick—a combination of horizontal wells and fracking—to unlock billions of barrels of overlooked oil from a subterranean shale…
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