In 1914 news from Eastern Mexico to the US was fast and furious and every trade journal devoted an entire section to Mexican activity. The concrete bunker surrounding the de Llano well has been replaced by sort of a concrete shrine over the top of the well head, complete with a cross on top. The completion of the shrine freed up 200 Federalists that had been protecting the well and allowed them to join three thousand other soldiers chasing Villa around one end of Northern Mexico to the other, to no avail.
The Buckley Brothers were still practicing law, mostly in Tampico, save William F. Buckley who was often in Mexico City decrying the revolutionists and their threats to oil fields in the Faja de Oro. Later in the year, after the US invaded Veracruz and pissed President Huerta off, Buckley was back in Mexico City trying to talk the Huerta regime out of a twenty cents per barrel tax on oil. At a buck ten per barrel, 20 cents was a big deal.
By 1915 the Panuco River Basin was producing big volumes of heavy oil and with all the higher gravity oil being produced from further south, from monster wells in the "Lane," storage was becoming a big, big problem. The area SW of Tampico was dotted with bolted storage tanks as far as the eye could see and by 1916 an estimated 14,000,000 barrels of Mexican oil was on hand at any given time awaiting loading on steamers bound for the Texas Gulf Coast.
By 1918 Mexico will become the 2nd largest oil producer in the world, behind only the US, and the largest oil exporter in the world.
