The Eagle Ford shale geological formation unfurls through the lower third of Texas, stretching 400 miles long and 50 miles wide from East Texas to Mexico, from Brazos County northeast of Houston to the Burgos Basin just over the border.

It could turn out to be the largest recoverable oil deposit ever found in the Lower 48.

And that, according to Dewitt County Judge Daryl Fowler, is a good thing. Fowler -- a native Texan who ran for office as a pro-oil Republican -- owns a ranch here in the south-central pocket of the state. Before his election, he studied petroleum land management, knowing he'd probably be hearing cases about Eagle Ford.

But from where he sits, behind his tidy desk in the courthouse in the county seat of Cuero, Eagle Ford is how the area can keep its young people from moving away. After all, all it takes now is a high school diploma for someone to land a job at one of the fracking companies near town, with a starting salary of $60,000.

“People who say this is going to end soon are very shortsighted,” says Fowler, 56. “I’m in the camp that says the Eagle Ford will be a catalyst for us to go forward.”

More than two hours northwest of Cuero is an oil pipeline known as Ho-Ho -- an acronym for “Houston, Texas, to Houma, Louisiana.” Until earlier this year it carried crude from the Louisiana Gulf to refineries in Texas. But technology has changed all that.

Now, oil workers can access oil and gas reservoirs underneath hard-to-reach places like towns and lakes, or even in solid rock, by using horizontal drilling and fracturing, or “fracking.” The process uses pressurized water mixed with sand and chemicals. Shell, which owns the Ho-Ho pipeline, recently reversed the direction of its flow. By the end of the year it will carry more than 325,000 barrels of Texas crude to Louisiana refineries.

The Ho-Ho reversal is significant for a slew of reasons, but crucially it illustrates just how huge the fracking boom in places like DeWitt County has become. It is an indication, perhaps, of an intention to eventually export U.S. oil -- a commodity so vital that sending it abroad would take an act of Congress.