Oil Supply

Report Outline
Questioned Adequacy of Domestic Oil Reserves
Oil Reserves and the Price Pf Crude Oil
Experiments with Petroleum Substitutes
New Oil Supplies from Foreign Sources
Special Focus

Questioned Adequacy of Domestic Oil Reserves

Petroleum as the Key to World Leadership

Repeated warnings have come from governmental and other sources during recent months that American petroleum reserves are approaching exhaustion, perhaps within a span of 15 to 20 years. Access to adequate oil supplies, it has been pointed out, is basic to a healthy peacetime economy, imperative in time of war, and essential to maintenance of a position of world leadership for the United States. Bernard M. Baruch pointed, in an interview Feb. 21, to the heavy drain upon American petroleum resources in World War II and asserted that “after the war the United States will face a struggle to remain the first power in the world.” Secretary of the Interior Ickes stated in a recent magazine article that known oil reserves in the nation have “a life expectancy of [about] 14 years,” and added that “we are passing over the threshold from an oil exporting nation to an oil importing one.” He believed the government should act directly to assist the petroleum industry and to acquire petroleum concessions in other nations.

Steps to assure adequate oil supply

Before the Truman Committee, Ickes stated that the United States “could not oil another war.” Earlier he had said:

We cannot count on an adequate supply [of petroleum]… because existing wells will begin to slow down in production as time goes on. It actually would take about 60 years to remove all of the known available oil from the ground,… We are doing as much wildeat drilling now as ever …but the new wells have only a. fraction of the capacity of those brought in during previous years,… We have been consuming petroleum nearly three times as fast as we have been able to discover new sources, …It would be foolhardy… to predict that we will be without petroleum in …even twenty year's. [But] there is sufficient evidence …to require that we …take out insurance against the future.