PETROLEUM.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 69, 17 April 1909, Page 6

PETROLEUM.

THE KOTUKU FIELD. Says the Grey River Argus :—" Alt! gether not less than liftecn or twenty thousand pounds have been spent in the search for oil. One party alone has proj bably spent eight or nine thousand pounds. But" there is no reason lor despair. Our only regret has licen that some arrangement was not conic to by which a powerful organisation should take hold of the enterprise and go to work systematically regardless of the absence of an immediate return. The work is evidently of far too great magnitude for a few individuals, no matter how enterprising they might be. On several occasions we have tried to point out that the finding of rock oil at Kotuku was full of such vast possibilities to the people of the Grey Valley that a huge company should lie formed, with which the people should identify themselves from patriotic reasons, on the basis of a large number of shares and calls on a scale that would allow the work to be prosecuted at a satisfactory rate without being much of a burden on the shareholders. It may be mentioned ineidc~.itally, that quite a number of experts—not of the class known as "mining experts" —have expressed the most hopeful opinions regarding KotvJku as an oil region, and anticipated that a. great future was before it. It is just auout twelve months ago that we received a letter from a friend in Sydney stating that he had an interview with an American oil expert regarding the probable existence of oil at Kotuku. It is enough for our purpose to say that tho gist of the interview was that the expert had been interested in sinking a shaft there to the depth of j 118 ft. After reaching that depth they found *n the following morning 7ft of pure oil (equal to the best Pennsylvania) -, in the shaft. He said that he intended bring "out another expert to test some likely ground situate between two range? in the Otira Gerge district. Ho reckoned that by sinking wells in this locality (the two are ten mile* apart) a p*'noiiienal flow of oil would be obtained. He prophesied a great future for the West Coast."