Taranaki Oil.

Progress, Volume VI, Issue 5, 1 March 1911, Page 575

Taranaki Oil.

'... After .many years the Taranaki oil people are on the verge of getting the subsidy offered for the first production of a given quantity of oil from New Zealand soil. There are now five wells, two of which are flowing, and of these one has a remarkably fine flow as flows go, and the value of the oil won is three times the value of oil won anywhere else. Here is an industry which may be about to circulate unlimited wealth from the country, which in. some respects is already the richest in the Dominion. It is the best news published yet from the Taranaki centre of the oil industry. At such a moment it is worth remembering that it is not the only oil district in the Dominion. Poverty Bay has oil. It is true that the district has also rather an unfavourable reputation by reason of the failure of certain men to make good on the oil indications. But that was the fault of the men, not of the oilfield. The oil-field may be good, bad, or indifferent; that is not the point, so much as the fact that the men did not spend money enough in exploring their property. They tried to grow rich on almost nothing. They spent enough to ruin themselves, but being only the smallest potatoes, and having a marvellous fund of ignorance of all

matters that oil men ought to know, they naturally came to desperate grief. In short, they spent enough to ruin them, but too little to exploit the industry. The industry is ready for further attempt. In the Greymouth district an attempt is being made on a very different scale. Mr. Ziman and his friends have put down some thousands of pounds, and in a short time the plant they are importing will give a good account of itself, as everybody in the district hopes. As the name of Ziman is a guarantee for well-directed shrewdness, the public may look forward to the out-turn at Greymouth with a certain amount of confidence. It is refreshing to get hold of a question of this kind. There is much talk of diminished credit, and some squeaking about a vanishing Waihi. Thus the talk of an increasing oilfield in one place and of increasing possibilities of oil in two others comes as a welcome counter irritant. We should be disposed to back the counterirritant.