HOW OIL COULD OIL THE WORKS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 108, 10 May 1939, Page 10

HOW OIL COULD OIL THE WORKS

Much is heaijfcl about tlie expansion of industry, through Government policy; birt there is one industry which, regardless of politics, will expand itself, if Nature is not niggard/in the essential commodity. That commodity is oil. The market for most primary products is vulnerable, as the recent history of trade restrictions proves; but the market position, and the general industrial position, of mineral oil seem to be unassailable. The whole question is whether oil is present in payable quantity; and the rest of the profit-^-once that primary fact is established—is so taken for granted that big oil interests do not hesitate to spend one million sterling in prospecting a favourable area. An industry that can spend in such big initial sums, on the all or nothing principle, stands apart from ordinary industries, and cannot be capitalised from the ordinary resources of a country like New Zealand. In mineral industries, cosmopolitan capital, sometimes reviled, is indispensable. Its success would be New Zealand's success.

Sir Colin Fraser, a New Zealander, aware that New Zealand is closer to the great Australian oil-consuming centres than ate New Guinea and some parts of Australia herself, and regarding this country as the nearest oil-bearing area to his adopted country, has a double reason for encouraging prospecting in the East Coast and Taranaki districts to the extent of half a million sterling and probably much more. Sir Colin

Fraser may not be able to see into| the future any more than do other eminent geologists, and everyone knows that oil prospecting sometimes fails; but the big-scale prospecting now undertaken provides a better hope, and a surer test, than did obsolete drilling methods of the past. Sir Colin Fraser explained in yesterday's issue why the more difficult task of drilling through deep overlying strata (East Coast area) has been, undertaken before tlie probably easier drilling job in Taranaki; in the latter district it is deemed more economic to make preliminary geophysical examination. His statement is a judicial estimate of the progress of testing work, and not a share-market utterance. He points out that oil would not only be a new industrial power in New Zealand, but a key commodity in the world market, possibly creating the long-sought balance in our trade with Australia.