IMPORTANCE OF OIL

Evening Star, Issue 23525, 14 March 1940, Page 12

IMPORTANCE OF OIL

RUNNING A MODERN WAR BRITAIN'S POSITION SATISFACTORY (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, March 12. Though experts on military questions, like professional economists, are rarely found all to agree on any single point in a highly controversial subject which they have chosen to study, it is clear that all are agreed in the vital importance which oil supplies must play in the conduct of modern warfare.

The position of Britain’s oil supplies was summarised in the current number, of the ‘ Petroleum Press Service,’ a reliable journal of the petroleum industry which clearly'proved it to he highly satisfactory. As regards the position of German supplies of oil, the facts contained in ‘This Fascinating Oil Business,’ by Mr Max Ball, a former president, of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, is considered in London to be most illuminating. SHORTAGE THREAT IN GERMANY, . This study reveals that even the lowest authoritative estimate of Germany’s , 1940 wartime oil requirements was 90,000,000 barrels, but if tho fighting became ■ active the author believes that Germany’s needs would increase to some 142,000,000 barrels, or two and a half times her peacetime needs, which, it is generally agreed, would be the normal increase of a country’s wartime over peacetime requirements, German oil production in 1938, including the occupied territories, was 19,000,000 barrels, figures which her newer oilfields and synthetic processes, Mr Ball points out, can scarcely raise beyond 25,000,000 barrels. In the author’s view Germany Las only sufficient oil in storage to prevent a shortage for, perhaps, nearly a year. QUICK DECISION WANTED. Mr Ball points out in this connection that, even if Germany obtained all of it, Rumania’s total export surplus amounts to only some 18,000,000 barrels a year, and Russia’s export surplus was only some 6,500,000 barrels in 1938. Mr Ball concludes: “ For Germany to win she must end the war in the near future or strike in home territory new oilfields much more productive than any she has found, or gain free access to ocean-borne oil supplies, or cut off the ocean-borne supplies of France and Britain. Up to the moment Germany has shown no convincing evidence of her ability to do any of these things.”