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Show a nuisance the. I often spoiled oil wells. The first commercial oil well was drilled in 1858 by E. L Drake at Titusville Pa., to a depth of g9'i ft. It started producing in August of 1859 and produced 30" bbls. of oil a day for several months. mon-ths. Crude oil was refined at first chiefly to obtain kerosene, and the lighter fraction, gasoline, was regarded re-garded as a useless and dangerously danger-ously explosive by-product, which was poured into the rivers as the safest means of disposing of it. With the advent of the automobile auto-mobile gasoline became the petroleum petro-leum product most sought after, while such incidental products as distillate and fuel oil were produc ed in surplus and sold cheaply. The modern hydrogenation and cat alyst cracking processes now make possible the conversion of crude into nearly any proportions of the various products which are in demand. de-mand. For the last twenty years developments in high compression engines seemed to indicate an ever ev-er growing need of more octane fuel , but the very latest engine developments, such as jet engines for aircraft which burn kerosene and diesels for heavy duty work, which burn fuel oil are demanding demand-ing more of the leavier and lower octane fuels. The origin of crude oil is not known, although it may be from ancient plant or animal life or both. From wherever it originates it moves or flows slowly under-, ground along porus or rock strata to points where it becomes trapped. trap-ped. The geological formations which trap oil are know as oil reservoir re-servoir structures. Most common of these is the anticline, which is a dome shaped structure in which oil tends to collect and from which it cannot escape. Natural gas given off by the oil will-collect When such a pool is lapped by an oil well, gas pressure forces the oil up through the well pipe. In making ther exploratory flight fli-ght with Mr. Beckwith, geologists Truchot and Heisy were looking for indications of anticlines, chiefly. chief-ly. If likely indications of these are seen from the air, they will make further explorations on the ground, and if these confirm their aerial observations the next step, in the words of Mr. Truchot would be to lease the land. While aerial observations are de cidedly preliminary the three hour flight covered as much ground as they could explore by other means only by weeks of work, and not infrequently geological formations which are not apparent to ground level observers are very plain from the air. Explorations by geophysical met hods mr.y aho bo made. Of thw the reflecting seismograph is ' useful for mapping subsurface . tours. Highly scientific method , exploring for oil pools have k developed, but the cost of drim wells has skyrocketed in re years. In contrast with Col iwl' 50 ft. well wells are now d,eJ as deep as 20,000 ft. Iecl Back in the 1920's experts r. dieted that our oil reserves Wo, L" be used up in ten years. Tod with more oil being used than m er before there are also J known underground reserves N ertheless old fields become worT ed out and now ones must be Hi covered. With all the known ,1' serves of oil, it remains an irren " ceable natural resource which some day, must be exhausted ' Neither Mr. Truchot nor Mr Heisy would predict how long 0u, oil reserves may last. Nor would they indicate the likelihood of find ing oil in the west Millard-Juan area.But they expect to stay here until Nov. engaged in exploration work for Standard of Indiana Sunday evening Mr. Beckwith treated 'the two geologists Mrs Heisy and myself to a show of his color slides of the Millard Countv points of interest ,and tome high ly colorful slides he had taken of the Wayne Wonderland. I OIL? MAYBE . . . Although petroleum has been 0 know for centuries and references to it were made in the writings of Aristotle, Pliny and Herodotus, ' it is only during the last hundred 1 years that it has become a really valuable commodity. For many years it was regarded as a nuis- i ance in the production of salt wat-i wat-i er but after commercial uses for oil were developed the old method of obtaining salt water from wells was adapted to the production of , oil and salt water then became I |