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McCamey, Texas: energy town, every era.
McCamey is a small West Texas town in Upton County, in the southern reaches of the Permian Basin. It began as an oilfield boomtown, later became widely known for wind power — it is commonly cited as the Wind Energy Capital of Texas — and today it sits near the center of the next energy era: converting the basin's surplus natural gas into firm electricity for AI data centers.
An oil town first
McCamey exists because of oil. The town rose with the Permian discoveries of the boom years, one of the storied West Texas oilfield towns where the rigs, the rail, and the workforce arrived together. Like most boomtowns it cycled with the commodity — but the oilfield never left. The surrounding country remains working energy land, produced continuously across generations, and the town's identity has stayed tied to what comes out of the ground.
The wind era
When wind development came to Texas, it came early to this country. The mesas around McCamey catch steady wind, and turbines went up on ridgelines that had overlooked pumpjacks for decades — which is how an oil town picked up its commonly cited designation as the Wind Energy Capital of Texas. The local lesson is a durable one: the resource changes, and the place keeps producing.
Why the AI buildout comes here
The third era runs on natural gas and land. The Permian around Upton County produces enormous volumes of associated gas — a byproduct of oil drilling that regularly outruns the pipelines built to carry it away, selling at some of the cheapest prices in the country. Add open land at the scale AI campuses require, a workforce that has built and run energy infrastructure for generations, and a culture accustomed to industrial development, and the area is a natural home for generation built where the fuel is. The economics behind that surplus are in why Waha gas is so cheap.
The next chapter
The newest development in that lineage is Power Foundry, Corley Energy's flagship project on roughly one thousand acres in Upton County near McCamey — land secured, gas supply signed, permits pulled — designed to convert stranded Permian gas into firm, contracted power for AI data centers, at hundreds of megawatts with a path to gigawatt scale. It extends a pattern the town has lived three times now: energy demand arrives, and this corner of West Texas goes to work. What a power foundry is: start here. Current capacity is on the Sites page.
About Corley Energy
Corley Energy is a behind-the-meter independent power producer, founded in 2024 by Jake Corley, Tim Bozeman, and Mark Meyer. We convert stranded Permian Basin natural gas into firm, contracted electricity for AI data centers at Power Foundry, our ~1,000-acre development in Upton County, Texas. Start with what a power foundry is, see the company facts, or check current capacity on the Sites page.
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