For a full century now we have been passing through different phases of
industrial and commercial life which have been characterized by some
form of power. First the age of steam, and then the age of electricity.
We have passed out of neither and yet we have come into another
age--that of petroleum. As a lubricant, it has become of such universal
use that it has been called the barometer of industry, and no doubt
after it has ceased to be a popular illuminant or a source of power it
will live invaluable as the thing which lets the wheels go round. Its
greatest popularity now arises out of its use in the internal-combustion
engine, and of the making of these there is no end. It draws railroad
trains and drives street cars. It pumps water, lifts heavy loads, has
taken the place of millions of horses, and in 20 years has become a
farming, industrial, business, and social necessity. The naval and the
merchant ships of this country and of England are fitted and being
fitted to use it either under steam boilers as fuel or directly in the
Diesel engine. The airplane has been made possible by it. It propels
that modern juggernaut, the tank. In the air it has no rival, while on
land and sea it threatens the supremacy of its rivals whenever it
appears. There has been no such magician since the day of Aladdin as
this drop of mineral oil. Medicines and dyes and high explosives are
distilled from it. No one knows whence it cometh or whither it goeth.
Men search for it with the passion of the early Argonauts, and the
promise now is that nations will yet fight to gain the fitful bed in
which it lies.
In Persia and in Palestine, in Java and in China, in southern Russia and
in Rumania we know that petroleum is, for it has been found there. How
great these fields or others in Europe, Asia, or Africa may be no one
would dare to say. As yet, however, the petroleum of the world has come
from this hemisphere.
The "oil spring" which George Washington found in western Virginia and
by his last will called to the especial consideration of his trustees
was the promise of a continental well which last year yielded
356,000,000 barrels. Each year has seen the prophecy unfulfilled that
the peak of the possible yield had been reached.
From the mountains of western Pennsylvania into the very ocean bed of
the Pacific and even beyond and into the broken strata of upturned
Alaska, the oil prospector bored with his sharp tooth of steel and found
oil. Hardly has one field fallen into a decline when another has come
rushing into service. Only three years ago and all hopes were centered
in Oklahoma, and then came Kansas, and then the turn went south again to
Texas, and now it looks toward Louisiana. Geologists have estimated and
estimated, and they do not differ widely, for few give more than thirty
years of life to the petroleum sands of this country if the present
yield is insisted upon. And yet there is so much of mystery in the
hiding of this strange subterranean liquid that honest men will not say
but that it will become a permanent factor in the world of light, heat,
and power. If this is not so we are a fatuous people, for with every
fifth man in the country the owner of an automobile and the expenditure
of hundreds of millions of dollars for roads fit only for their use, and
with ships by the hundred specially constructed to burn oil, we have
surely given a large fortune in pledge of our faith that our pools of
petroleum will not soon be drained dry, or that others elsewhere will
come to our help.
In 1908 the country's production of oil was 178,500,000 barrels, and
there was a surplus above consumption of more than 20,000,000 barrels
available to go into storage. In 1918, 10 years later, the oil wells of
the United States yielded 356,000,000 barrels--nearly twice the yield of
1908--but to meet the demands of the increased consumption more than
24,000,000 barrels had to be drawn from storage. The annual fuel-oil
consumption of the railroads alone has increased from 16-2/3 to 36-3/4
million barrels; the annual gasoline production from 540,000,000 gallons
in 1909 to 3,500,000,000 gallons in 1918. This reference to the record
of the past may be taken not only as justifying the earlier appeal for
Federal action, but as warranting deliberate attention to the oil
problem of to-day.
Fuel oil, gasoline, lubricating oil--for these three essentials are
there no practical substitutes or other adequate sources? The obvious
answer is in terms of cost; the real answer is in terms of man power.
Whether on land or sea, fuel oil is preferred to coal because it
requires fewer firemen, and back of that, in the man power required in
its mining, preparation, and transportation the advantage on the side of
oil is even greater. So, too, the substitute for gasoline in
internal-combustion engines, whether alcohol or benzol, means higher
cost and larger expenditure of labor in its production.
There are large bodies of public land now withdrawn, which, under the
new leasing bill which seems so near to final passage after seven years
of struggle and baffled hope, will in all likelihood make a further rich
contribution to the American supply.