OIL FOR EUROPE AND AMERICA

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25389, 12 January 1948, Page 9

OIL FOR EUROPE AND AMERICA

SHORTAGE LIKELY IN WINTER INSUFFICIENT TRANSPORT AVAILABLE (From Our Own Correspondent.) NEW YORK, November 30. Struggling to rebuild its war-bat-tered economy, the worjfl faces an oil shortage this winter—a Phenomenon unknown in peace time for tne last quarter of a century, sa y, s __ an article in the “New York Times. How severe it will be depends on the weather. Oil men are hoping mightily for a mild winter. To-day there is enough oil in proved fields through the world—so billion barrels is a conservative figure—to meet all our needs. But there are not enough ships, pipelines, tank cars, barges and refineries to get it where, and in the form, it is needed; and at the moment, there is not enough steel to make more of the facilities. The United States last year used more oil than the whole world before the war, and to-day uses twice as much to keep warm and working as the rest of the world combined. Motorists, farmers and! truck fleets use a third more gasoline. Railroads use more diesel fuel. us® more light heating oil for the 500.000 new oil furnaces installed during the year. Ships and industrial plants use more heavy fuel oil. With the benevolence of the weather gods, the East Coast, which gets more than 95 per cent, of its oil by tanker from the Gulf and Caribbean areas, and West Coast, which produces its own, hope to scrape through the winter with a minimum of trouble. A shortage of tankers has developed on the East Coast which threatens to make supplies, especially home-heat-ing oil, exceedingly tight. Most companies have already warned their dealers not to sell more new oil furnaces than they can service. Householders with oil furnaces are being told not to “overheat” their homes and how to keep warm with less oil. The oil problem is world-wide and must be tackled on that basis. To keep our own precarious supply-de-mand balance, we import neavily from Venezuela. As our needs go up we will want to draw more heavily. But Venezuela is already producing at fujl blast. If we import more, Venezuela’s other customers in Europe will get less when they need more. Britain’s Needs England is counting heavily on oil. Even before last winter she started converting her locomotives, power and industrial plants to oil. While oil will not replace coal as her basic fuel, it bulks large in her recovery plans. So, too, in France and Italy, where industrial activity has depended largely on coal. Both nations are piecing together their war-blasted refineries —neither has much in the way of oil resources—planning new ones and meanwhile importing increasing amounts of products. Sweden, before the last war a large importer of British coal, had fe do something when those imports were cut off. She is turning more and more to oil. Nowhere on the Continent will oil supplant coal, but it is already a big factor in getting many countries back on their economic feet.