Ellis Wyatt

Ellis Wyatt is the head of Wyatt Oil in Atlas Shrugged: the young oilman who almost single-handedly revived the economy of Colorado by pulling oil from shale deposits the industry had written off. His disappearance is the most violent in the novel, and the fire he leaves burning behind him becomes its standing image of what the looters' world costs.

“I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours.”
~ Ellis Wyatt's note, Atlas Shrugged

What he built

Wyatt inherited a depleted field and a method everyone agreed was exhausted, and got oil out of it anyway. The Colorado boom that follows is the novel's picture of what one man's judgment does to a regional economy: Dagny Taggart rebuilds the Rio Norte Line in Rearden Metal because Wyatt's traffic makes it necessary, and the John Galt Line exists because he does.

He is also, before his disappearance, the least patient of the producers with the men regulating him. Where Hank Rearden argues and complies, Wyatt states the terms of trade and expects them honoured, and he tells Dagny plainly that he will not be sacrificed to anyone's need. Rand uses him as the producer who has not accepted the moral premise Rearden has — which is why his break, when it comes, is immediate rather than gradual.

Wyatt's Torch

When a directive forces the railroads to cut service to Colorado and simultaneously requires Wyatt to increase production, the arrangement is one he cannot meet and is not meant to meet. He sets fire to his own wells and vanishes, leaving the note above nailed at the site.

The fire cannot be put out. It burns for the rest of the novel, visible from the rail line, and everyone who passes it calls it Wyatt's Torch. Rand gives it more narrative weight than any other single object in the book because it does two jobs at once: it is the concrete proof that a productive enterprise is not a natural resource waiting to be claimed, and it is a permanent public accusation that the looters have to keep driving past.

The note is the argument in one line. Wyatt did not take anything away. He returned the field to exactly the condition in which he found it, and the value that has gone was never in the ground. See Productiveness, Property rights and Exploitation.

His place in the strike

Wyatt's exit is the novel's first destructive one, and it changes the character of the strike for the reader. The earlier disappearances are quiet and look like desertion; this one is unmistakably a statement.

He is later found in Galt's Gulch, running a small operation that produces enough for the valley and no more, and content. The contrast Rand draws is between the scale of what he could do and the scale of what he will do for the world outside — the point being that the difference is not a loss he suffers but one the world does. See John Galt and Trader Principle.

Common misunderstandings

That burning the wells is spite. The property is his, the alternative is seizure, and the note is addressed to men who had announced their intention to take it. Whether it should also have been legally protected is a separate question the novel's world has already answered in the negative.
That the shale process is a technological claim. It is a plot device for an innovation others thought impossible, in the same way Rearden Metal is.
That his impatience is a character flaw. Rand contrasts it favourably with Rearden's patience, which the novel treats as the more expensive mistake.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "What Is Capitalism?", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 9.