Ector County Texas map
31.87° N · 102.54° W · County seat: Odessa · 902 sq mi
Ector County is one city and its oil field. Odessa holds roughly two of every three people in the county, and almost everything outside the city limits is pump jacks, tank batteries, pipe yards and caliche lease roads. The one natural landmark is a hole in the ground: the Odessa meteor crater, on the southwest edge of town.
Odessa fills the center-east of the county. I-20 clips the south side of the city; Midland is one county east.
Where Ector County is
Ector sits in the middle of the Permian Basin, on flat, treeless ground about 2,900 feet above sea level. Andrews County is north, Midland County east, Upton southeast, Crane south, Ward southwest and Winkler west toward the New Mexico line. The county is an almost perfect square about 30 miles on a side, with no river, no natural lake and no state park.
The important geography is not physical but municipal. Odessa's city hall and Midland's are 20 miles apart on I-20, and the two cities have grown toward each other until the corridor between them — the airport, the college campuses, the oilfield supply yards along SH-191 — belongs to neither one. Odessa is the field town, Midland the office town. Together they are counted as one combined statistical area.
The county was cut out of Tom Green County in 1887 and organized in 1891. It carries the name of Matthew Ector, a Confederate general who later served as a Texas judge. Odessa was already there, founded in 1881 as a siding on the Texas and Pacific Railway.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| Odessa (county seat, part) | City | 110,658 |
| Goldsmith | City | 237 |
Odessa straddles the Ector–Midland line; the figure above is the part inside Ector County. The city total is 114,428.
Those two incorporated places are the whole list. Goldsmith, 20 miles northwest of Odessa off SH-158, is a gas-plant town that has never had more than a few hundred residents. Everything else in the county — Penwell, Notrees, Gardendale — is an unincorporated cluster of houses at a road junction or a plant gate.
Roads
- I-20 – enters from the southwest near Penwell, runs along the south side of Odessa and leaves east into Midland County. The main street of the Permian Basin.
- Loop 338 – the full ring around Odessa, carrying truck traffic that would otherwise go through downtown.
- SH-191 – the four-lane divided highway between Odessa and Midland north of I-20, the direct link between the two downtowns.
- US-385 – north from Odessa as Andrews Highway toward Andrews; south from I-20 toward Crane and the Pecos country.
- SH-302 – due west from Odessa to Kermit in Winkler County, a hundred miles of oil leases and no town.
- SH-158 – northeast toward Sterling City by way of Midland County.
The Odessa meteor crater
About eight miles southwest of Odessa, just off I-20 near the Moss Avenue exit, is a shallow bowl roughly 550 feet across that was made by an iron meteorite. It is one of the largest impact craters in the United States and one of only a handful anywhere with meteorite fragments still being found around it. Thousands of years of blowing sand have filled the crater to within a few feet of the surrounding plain, so from the road it reads as a slight dip rather than a hole; the rim is clearer on the ground than from a car. A small visitor building and a walking trail sit at the site, and the surrounding pasture is fenced ranch land.
The rest of the county's landscape is engineered. Ector County produces oil from the Permian's shallower carbonate zones as well as the deeper shale benches, and the surface reflects it: gathering lines, saltwater disposal wells, gas processing plants at Goldsmith and Penwell, and a petrochemical complex on the west side of Odessa. Water is the constraint — rainfall averages about 14 inches a year and the county has no surface supply, so municipal water is pumped in from reservoirs on the Colorado River more than a hundred miles east.
Odessa also carries the county's institutions: the Ector County Coliseum, Ratliff Stadium, Odessa College and the University of Texas Permian Basin. The nearest commercial airport is Midland International, 20 miles east in Midland County, which serves both cities under one name.