CANADIAN OIL WELL.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18847, 9 April 1931, Page 2

CANADIAN OIL WELL.

NEW EXTRACTION PROCESS. The largest oilfield in the world is about to be tapped in Canada, writes Mr James Montagues, in Chambers’s Journal. An oil deposit that will require no sinking of wells will give up an estimated amount of 100 billion barrels of crude oil to supply the machinery of modern civilisation. A deposit estimated by scientists to be 40,000,000 to 100,000,000 years old will yield its wealth of liquid fuel. This information came to light recently in Toronto when a famous railway engineer disclosed that a secretly and thoroughly tested machine had been perfected to extract pure crude oil from the bituminous sands of Northern Alberta. The field is by no means a new discovery| It has been known since hunters first invaded the then unknown in their quest for furs and the establishment of trading posts for barter with the Indians. Then and later people who went into that country thought the bubbling pools of dark fluid to be tar. So the tar springs of Northern Alberta became known. Here was a region, so explorers and hunters reported, that was rich in oil. It required only the separation of the oil from the sand. Engineers and financiers and those who would get rich quick went trooping to the northern oilfields, all certain that the sands would yield them easy wealth. But they found to their dismay that the sand and the oil would not separate as easily as they expected. Many of the fortune-hunters were obliged to return, leaving engineers with much financial support behind. Wells were drilled; excavations were made. Machines were brought into the country before a railway was built. Millions of dollars were spent by Americans, Canadians, Germans and Englishmen in an effort to find ways and means of extracting from these seemingly endless deposits of sand the fluid that coloured them so darkly. A few years ago the Canadian Government recalled practically all the unworked leases which had been granted in the last twenty years to hopeful prospectors for oil. The Government was determined to ensure that no one should hold the land unworked against the time when someone j would invent a machine which would j extract pure oil from the sand. The British Navy was looking to the field, as well. The machine that has been invented is called a constant centrifuge. It may best be described as being similar to a cream separator, except that it is much more complicated and larger. The same type of machine is used in many other processes of separation, such as separating low-grade ores from complex materials, clarifying lard, separating silica from clay and other non-metallic minerals. The machine will separate and clean any combination of materials of differing specific gravities. The process which will release this wealth of oil is simple. It has been demonstrated on the spot that it can manufacture from a load of dark coloured sand a pure crude oil as cheaply as it can be brought to the surface in gushes in other parts of Canada. Only warm water is required as an aid, and the oil is produced in forty-five seconds from the time the sand and water are poured into the machine. The results of the process, which was invented by Mr W. C. Laughlin, an engineer of New York City, have set many experts wondering whether it will bring about a reduction in the price of oil. A machine capable of treating GOO tons of sand a day is being shipped to the field to supersede the experimental machine which was established there in 1929.