FLOWING STREAMS OF PETROLEUM

West Coast Times, Issue 328, 11 October 1866, Page 1 (Supplement)

FLOWING STREAMS OF PETROLEUM

STRUCK IN CALIFORNIA.

' An important event in the progress of our State is the cutting of several tunnels that yield flowing streams of petroleum near San Buenaventura, giving reason to presume that numerous or numberless similar streams may be obtained by other tunnels. It was confidently asserted that California contains no petroleum, and afterwards that such petroleum as there might be could only be obtained by pumping and in small quantities. These assertions were for a long time not disproved, but a number of persons, notwithstanding every discouragement, continued their explorations, expending a total of p*obably a million dollars. It is said that 130,000 dols. were spent in the Ojal rancho alone. Only four miles from that rancho is the land of ( the Stanford Oil Works, where several tunnels have been cut into the oilbearing shale, and from every tunnel a steady stream of oil is obtained — one turfnel yielding more than 500 gallons daily. The higher the tunnel the thicker the consistency of the petroleum, and the less the proportion of valuable oil ; but beyond a certain depth the workmen are troubled very much by gas, and the petroleum is mixed with water. One tunnel produced petroleum containing eighty per cent, of oil, white the petroleum obtained from an older tunnel, twenty-four feet higher up, scarcely contained half so much oil. In these tunnels the petroleum wells up from the bottom, yielding in the deepest tunnel eight gallons per day for each linear foot of the tunnel in the oil-bearing rock, which extends for miles. The rock, a sandy shale, stands at an angle of abou*. forty-live degrees to the horizon. In the Stanford rancho, the main tunnel is 1200 feet above the sea, and runs into a hill, the summit of which may have an elevation of 2200 feet. It is the theory of Mr S. Moss, the author of the tunnel project, that the oblique direction and loose texture of the petroleum shale in California will prevent the oil from flowing out of any well. In his opinion, the petroleum,' as it approaches the surface, becomes mixed with the sulphur, iron, and- salt found in the earth and rock, and these, with earth materials, furnish the brea, or asphaltuin, which oozes up out of the ground at many places along the coast. (Several thousand barrels of San Buenaventura oil have already reached San Francisco, and if the supply is as large and permanent as persons who have been on the ground imagine it will not be long before Californian kerosene will supply all our home demand, and crowd the kerosene of Pcnsylvania in foreign markets. — " AHa California.' 1