State of Oil

Delegates to the American Petroleum Institute convention at Los Angeles last week were presented with 1,000 gardenias and 3,000 carnations as they alighted from their trains. Adjourning to the Los Angeles Biltmore they heard their chiefs: demand that the Federal Government keep its hands off the oil industry; scoff at predictions that the U. S. oil supply would be soon exhausted; bemoan petroleum's annual tax bill ($1,000,000,000). Then they re-elected President Axtell J. Byles. Vice President-at-Large Kenneth Raleigh Kingsbury, some 85 other directors.

Only controversial note was struck over the unstabilized production of California oil. Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado and Illinois belong to the Interstate Compact which restricts oil production through agreement between member states. California stands outside the compact. Said Oklahoma's Governor Ernest Whitworth Marland, in absentia*: "As long as any one State takes unto itself the absolute determination of the amount that State should produce . . . then just that long are we going to have a disorganized and wasteful condition in the industry." To Governor Marland's wrath, Californians Kingsbury (Standard Oil Co. of California) and Adolph Leopold Weil (General Petroleum Corp.) had ready a soft answer. Most Californian producers, said they, favor the Interstate Compact but the present laws of California prohibit them from joining it.

With the main issue of California and the Compact disposed of, Mr. Weil--who substituted for another speaker and talked extemporaneously--went on to stir up an intra-California conflict. Californian overproduction, said he, exists chiefly in the Kettleman Hills field, "owned by strong people ... a field which should be a leader in the conservation movement. . . . If five men, at most . . . would sit down together and forget their personal animosities and their megalomania, their desire to be big shots in the oil industry, this whole situation could be cleared up in a single noonday session.'' Mr. Weil did not name his live men, but Mr. Kingsbury's Standard Oil of California is one of the Kettleman owners. Other oil men in Kettleman are Union Oil's Leonard St. Clair; Amerada's Alfred Jacobsen. William Reinhardt. manager of the Kettleman North Dome Association and tall, bald William Keck of independent Superior Oil Co., known to oil men as "Killem" Keck.

*Governor Marland's address was read by Tom Anglin, Interstate Compact Committeeman. When "press of state business" was given as accounting for Governor Marland's inability to attend the A. P. I. convention, Oklahoma newsmen asked, "This business is not Jim Berry, is it, Governor?" Had Governor Marland left Oklahoma, Lieutenant Governor James E. Berry could have called a special session of the Legislature which--so ruffled is Oklahoma politics--might have moved to impeach Governor Marland on trumped up charges.

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