The great Appalachian district, so long the leader in this country, is now rapidly approaching its end, and its demise may presage the actual decline of the whole American industry. In 1891 Pennsylvania reached the height of its long career with a yield of over 33,000,000 barrels, but since then the downward course has been steady. To day the entire Appalachian field from New York to Tennessee yields less than two thirds of that amount. Other fields in this country are going the same way. Ohio, which reached almost 24,000, 000 barrels in 1896, had fallen to hardly more than 12,000,000 in 1907. Texas dropped with unparal leled rapidity from 28,000,000 to less than half that quantity in two years. They tell the story of oil with absolute truth. In each of these older fields thousands of new wells have been drilled annually during the whole progress of the de cline, hundreds of thousands of wells in all, with out sufficing to maintain the former supply. Every year has seen an increasing percentage of "dry" holes, until now many districts are so far depleted that one out of every three wells sunk fails to yield oil. • This decline in the Appalachian field has come just when the demand for the highest grade oils is greater than ever, and growing annually. The rapidly increasing use of gasoline and the other lighter products of distillation cannot well be met from the supplies of heavy asphalt oils from the Gulf and the California fields. Already many wells reported as productive have really reached a condition where the production, amounting per haps to less than a barrel a day, can be done at a profit only through the strictest economy or be cause the oil is of a special quality. Unless some new supplies of high-grade oil are discovered soon, the price of the lighter refined oils must advance, and the heavy drain on the Appalachian region will result in speedy exhaustion.
The ultimate fate of every petroleum-producing region is plainly written in the character of the deposit. Every well, every locality, shows essen tially identical stages of development. The well begins as a gusher, perhaps, gradually ceases to flow, has a pump installed, and finally ceases to yield at all, as salt water appears in the pipe. Every step is steadily downward. The locality begins with a boom, yielding enormous quantities for a time, settles down to steady production ; then wells begin to fail, others can be operated prof itably only by adopting the most economical meth ods of pumping, perhaps a hundred or more in one multiple system ; new wells fail to find oil ; and the end is close at hand.
Many wells in the Appalachian region at the present time can be operated profitably only be cause a local supply of natural gas permits the use of the cheapest kind of power in the form of gas engines; in whole sections, the industry is kept alive solely by this means. The failure of the gas supply would mean not only the immediate aban donment of thousands of wells now yielding a few gallons a day but also a greatly increased cost of securing the oil from other wells. Fields less abundantly supplied with stores of natural gas, as appears to be the case in many of the newer localities, must inevitably reach the limit of prof itable operation more quickly. As it is with indi
vidual wells and separate localities, so it must be sooner or later with whole countries.
The important point in the future of petroleum, therefore, is easily foreseen. As long as new local ities can be discovered and developed rapidly enough to counterbalance the decline of old fields, the industry will continue to flourish. It is not impossible that even some of the older localities may witness a revival of operations as the future brings improved and cheaper methods of deep drilling. In certain parts of the Appalachian dis trict, for example, strata known to be oil bearing elsewhere can be reached only with wells 6,000 feet deep, and such deep drilling has not yet been undertaken. If valuable accumulations of petro leum do lie thus deeply buried, important devel opments from that source may come long after the upper strata have been completely exhausted. This possibility, however, is comparatively remote, partly because the existence of deposits at such great depths is still purely hypothetical, and partly because the cost of production from very deep wells would be greatly increased over the present figures.
The principal hope for. the future rests on the results obtained in the places where surface indi cations of petroleum are known to exist. The char acter and extent of these deposits can be revealed only through future attempts at commercial de velopment, but there are many reasons justifying the belief that deposits, as rich as any now worked, are still untouched. The future will certainly see profitable oil industries carried on in many regions where a beginning is yet to be made, perhaps in localities so far not even associated with the name of petroleum. These unproved deposits, if • they fulfill all expectations, will at first much more than counteract the decline in older fields. Thus, the prospects of an increased world's production, for a time at least, are exceedingly good.
Russia undoubtedly possesses far greater petro leum deposits than any other country, and is ap parently destined to lead the world. There is, of course, no telling to what extent the industry may develop in the Dutch East Indies or in some of the little known portions of the different conti nents, but, in the light of present knowledge, Rus sia stands unrivalled. Enormous tracts of oil bearing territory are known to exist in the vast area of the Russian Empire, in fields which the government will not yet open to exploitation. The Baku oil field apparently extends beneath the Caspian Sea because the eastern shore, oppo site Baku, is marked by the rich deposits of the trans-Caspian provinces. The opening of the trans-Caspian Railway .stimulated exploration of the resources of the district traversed, and all the signs indicate valuable fields of petroleum nearly parallel to the railroad. No developments of any importance have been undertaken here, however, partly because of its isolation from markets, but mainly because the government fears that over production would injure the whole industry, and consequently refuses to allow exploitation. The government has not forgotten the enormous waste during the early days of some of the Baku pools, when millions of barrels of oil were burned merely to be rid of it.