F ROM ALMOST EVERY
POINT OF VIEW, petroleum was “strategic mineral number one” during the World
War that ended in 1945. Even the spectacular advent of the atomic bomb in the
final days of the conflict did not displace it from its position of prime
importance, although within a few years uranium will almost certainly be the
“number one” material in the minds of military strategists, if it is not even
now in that position. It was the ceaseless flow of petroleum from the oil
fields of the United States, Venezuela, the Middle East, and a few other places
of lesser importance that kept the Allied Forces in motion on land and sea and
in the air, the world around, and even provided them with some of the most
potent of their weapons. It was the progressive attrition of Germany’s supplies
of oil that clipped the wings of the Luftwaffe and made possible the
astonishingly swift advance of the Allied Forces from the periphery of Hitler’s
ill-gotten empire to its nerve center in Berlin. It was the cutting of the
supply lines from the oil fields of the East Indies to Japan and the exhaustion
or destruction of the Japanese stores of petroleum that presaged the
capitulation of the Japanese war lords, even before the bombs fell on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Verily, the Allied Powers rode to victory on a flood of oil. Now
that the “shooting war” is ended, and as we turn to the distressingly difficult
task of arranging a peaceful world in which men may use the rich resources of
our bountiful earth for the welfare of all mankind, petroleum continues to hold
its leadership among the natural resources of the earth. Both as fuel and as
raw material for chemical industries, petroleum will hold the center of the
stage for many years to come. Hardly any other substance illustrates so fully
the manner in which science and technology may be combined to achieve the
utmost success in contributing to human efficiency and comfort. Fundamental to
any understanding of the problems implied by my topic is the comprehension of
the fact that petroleum is a nonrenewable resource; it is in the category of
nature’s stored capital, not of man’s annual income. It is, of course, true
that the geologic processes responsible for oil pools are continuing to operate
today as in the past. On the sea floor off the coast of southern California,
for example, there are broad hollows where the tissues of marine animals and
plants are now accumulating in mud and ooze at depths of 200 or 300 fathoms.
The conditions are closely similar to those that recurred repeatedly during the
Paleozoic era in Oklahoma and Texas, when the oil of certain rich oil fields
was being generated. But millions of years must elapse before that organic
material can be transformed into petroleum, stored in the interstices of
overlying sandstones, and made available by crustal movements for recovery from
wells to be drilled by some future inhabitants of the earth’s surface. In
relation to the feverish haste of mankind’s insatiable demands, the creative
processes of nature’s laboratory operate very slowly. For all practical
purposes our planet must be reckoned as a storehouse of such minerals as
petroleum, not as a factory in which that substance is generated year by year,
or even millenium by miblenium. Mother Earth has made available a cupboard
richly stocked with a vast amount and a great variety of goods indispensable to
us in an age of science and technology, and among these stores we find
petroleum. Each year we go to the shelves of that cupboard and take away a few
packages of the goods stored thereon; if we keep going long enough, some day
someone will find that the cupboard is bare. Indeed, petroleum is now being
used at such a rate in relation to its total amount in the earth’s crust that
its complete exhaustion is, from a geological viewpoint, alarmingly imminent.
Between 1859, when the first oil well was drilled in the United States, and
January 1, 1947, the production of petroleum from all parts of the world has
totaled nearly 52,000,000,000 barrels. Of that total, slightly more than
30,000,000,000 barrels were produced in the United States. As shown in Fig. 1,
the annual production, both for the world as a whole and for the United States,
has increased each year since 1938, with the sole exception of 1942, the first
year of American participation in the war, and there is every indication that
these increases will continue for the next few years.