Biggest Drive For British Oil

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 298, 16 December 1937, Page 5

Biggest Drive For British Oil

LARGE-SCALE OPERATIONS PLANNED WITH MACHINERY PROM TJ.S. PIELDS.

Sixteen hundred tons of the most up-to-date and powerful oil-boring machinery, similar to that used in the T6xan oilfields, is shortly to be shipped from the United States to the Thames. It is to be used in what will be the biggest drive for oil in Mid-Kent since Government licenses were first issued for oil prospecting in England. Ground survey operations by various companies in Kent have been completed. In particular the Gulf Exploration Company's surveys justify, a belief

that oil in marketable quantities lies beneath the surface of the land around Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells, Gillingham, Sittingbourne and Gravesend. Boring to a depth of 3500 feet in Sussex has proved abortive, but the new machinery, which is to be used in Kent, will strike down to beyond 5000 feet. Au official of the Gulf Exploration Company, which is a subsidiary of the Gulf Exploration Company of America, told the Daily Sketch that it had always been their custom to use machinery wherever possible. “But there are certain sections of oil-boring machinery which we and others have to import from America," he added. The D'Arcy Exploration Co., a subsidiary of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, is also pushing forward its drilling in, fchq south-east of gngland* -—,