WORLD'S PETROL SUPPLY.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 160, 25 November 1926, Page 7

WORLD'S PETROL SUPPLY.

PROFESSOR THORPE’S PREDICTIONS. Views Flatly Contradicted. Professor Thorpe’s warning as to a possible shortage of petrol, and his complaints as to present methods of production being wasteful, are poohpoohed by the Petroleum Times, which finds it its duty “ to differ in toto from the learned professor’s statements “ We fail to see how the production of crude oil to-day could be based upon a policy which allows less waste than prevails. Conservation is practised in every direction, since waste spells financial loss, and no organised development company is going to tolerate this. The employment of crude methods in refining is quite non-existent to-day, and it is to he regretted that the British Association has allowed such a misleading statement to be broadcast. The oil industry can boast of the use of the best brains in the two hemispheres in the furtherance of the most scientific

methods of the extraction of products and in the employment of all operations which are calculated to prevent waste. “ As to the coming famine in petrol, we have the assurance of all whose views count for something in the world of oil that there is scarcely a vestige of fact to support the contention of coming famine. We agree that the. consumption of motor spirit is increasing throughout the world—even the man in the street knows this—but to suggest that we are arriving at an age when our consumptive demands will exceed the supply is, to the seriously-thinking man in oil, an assertion absolutely uncorroborated, and, so far as can he seen, contrary to fact. The oilfields ■of the world have to-day scarcely been scratched for their content of oil, and double the use is made of every single barrel coming -from Mother Earth that was made but a few years ago. While the world’s oilfields should have given out in 1924, according to the 13 years’ estimate made by an eminent geologist in 1911, this year,there will be a record production, which couldbe increased at once by 50 per cent.”