THE VITAL SPIRIT

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1081, 19 September 1930, Page 13

THE VITAL SPIRIT

PETROL PROPHETS ERR IN AMERICA WHAT SCIENCE HAS BONE For twenty years we have been told that> our petroleum reserves must soon be exhausted and that “stepping on ■the gas” must disapear from the vernacular (says the “New York Times”). Who does not remember the gloomy prediction of the National Conservation Commission appointed two decades ago to consider our natural resources? It was enough to make any automobile driver shudder and wonder whether or not he ought to trade in ■the old bus for a new one to learn j that there was a minimum of but j eight billion barrels of oil in the J ground in ISOS. Since then we have .produced more oil than that. In the last eleven years alone over seven and E.-half billion barrels have been pumped up. The total of somewhere more than nine billion barrels reported by the United States Geological Survey in 1922 as the beginning of exhaustion has been surpassed. And still we pump oil, and still we step on the gas. All this does not mean that oil prophets are to be greeted with derisive laughter. Kach year marks the discovery of a more efficient method of prospecting for petroleum and for bringing it to the surface. The chemist persists in discovering how to “crack” more gasoline from "crude.” If, despite the predictions of yesterday, 25,000,000 of us still step on the gas, it is because no allowance can be made for tbe advances of science. We detect oil by means of artificial earthquakes now, something the old conservationists could not forsee. We manage to drive wells miles deep, whereas Colonel Drake reached a depth of only 69ft in 1559. By more scientific refining methods we extract twice as much gasoline from a barrel of “crude” as we did only ten years ago. Now comes hydrogenation, a catalytic process which may possibly enable us to extract 100 gallons of crude oil. Who knows where this will end ? As a rule, scientifie research has made an industry richer. In the oil industry it has brought about overproduction both in crude oil and in gasoline. Surely it is one of the anomalies of economics that science and engineering should actually have so embarrassed an industry with riches that it is unable to reap an adequate profit. Such a paradox must soon correct itself. The statisticians of the oil industry already regard their graphs as rainbows. There are signs, despite science. that gasoline production must at last fall to the level of consumption. Last year the gain over 1928 was 13.5 per cent.; this year it promises to be but 8.7 per cent. The time would seem ripe for another statistically supported warning that the generation which will motor not only on roads but in tbe air. must husband its petroleum treasures.