Oil

Speeches by many an oilman and Roger W. Babson, airplane races and stunting. exhibits of $12,000,000 worth of equipment last week entertained 100,000 visitors to the Sixth International Petroleum Exhibition and Congress, held in Tulsa, Okla. Yet to oilmen entertainment such as this can be only transitory. Always jostling their composure is knowledge that world consumption trails production. But one development during the Exposition cheered them, so cheered ever-optimistic Edwin Benjamin Reeser, president of the American Petroleum Institute, that he predicted U. S. production and consumption would balance by Jan. 1, 1930.

The cheerful development was that 28 Oklahoma oil producers had met, unanimously agreed to put state-wide restrictions into effect. Previous voluntary curtailment, believed by oilmen to be the only remedy for overproduction, had been mostly between operators in a single field. Two such restrictions went in effect in Oklahoma last month and are believed to have been the reason that Midcontinent petroleum prices have been maintained while oil from other fields has been reduced.

While this decision will keep Midcontinent production stabilized, there were many oilmen who disagreed with President Reeser's prediction that it will settle U. S. overproduction. Drilling in California is expected to bring in new supplies, and constitutionality of the State Conservation Law (TIME, Oct. 14) is being questioned. Government reports last week indicated that while 3,000,000 acres are in production, there are 22,000,000 acres of unproved oil land. There is no satisfactory protection against these fields being opened and operated. In storage is enough oil to furnish the U. S. demands even if all production were entirely shut down for nine months.

Exposition visitors who chanced to be in Oklahoma City later in the week watched two figures, protected by metal shields and a heavy barrage of water, start to work their way toward the centre of an oil fire. They were Mack and Fred Kinley, famed for their fire-fighting technique. After two days of slow progress, the Kinleys succeeded in removing the twisted debris of the derrick and in placing a gelatin bomb near the well's flame-spouting mouth. The same moment that an electric contact ignited the bomb a special battery of boilers threw live steam on the blaze, snuffed it out. Grim and taciturn, the Kinley boys glanced up as the explosion took place, then plodded away without looking back.