OIL SUPPLIES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 88, Issue 7, 10 January 1944, Page 5

OIL SUPPLIES

ACCESS AFTER WAR U.S. EQUITY PLEDGE Recd. 6.40 p.m. Rugby, Jan. 7. President Roosevelt’s latest LendLease report answers a complaint that petrol has been drawn too heavily from the United States with the statement that this year a much larger part of the oil needed in the Mediterranean will come from sources under British control. He gives a pledge that after the war all the nations will have fair and equal access to oil supplies. The report states that the United States is actually exporting a smaller quantity of petroleum products than before the war. “We are using for our own war industry and the armed forces about 88 per cent, of the oil we produce,” it says. “The additional production of crude petroleum in the United States since the outbreak of war and the curtailment of our nonessential civilian demands have been caused not by Lend-Lease, but by the demands of our war industries and the armed forces.” Mr. Roosevelt added that production in the Middle East had already surpassed the pre-war production and greatly exceeded that of two years ago, whe< the whole area was threatened with the danger of falling into Nazi control.—B.O.W.