Scintillating for Oil

Most geophysical methods of oil-prospecting do not show the oil itself. All they show are underground structures that may or may not contain oil. Often the wells drilled into them reach nothing of value.

Chemical and Engineering News tells about a prospecting system that seems to point to the oil itself. Prospector Hans Lundberg of Toronto surveys an oil-promising territory by flying back & forth across it in an airplane equipped with a scintillometer* to count the low-energy gamma rays coming up from the earth.

The radioactivity varies a good deal, but its intensity is unusually low directly over an. oil or gas deposit and unusually high just beyond its edge. Lundberg has checked his system by surveying proven oil fields. Usually, his radiation charts showed what had already been found.

Lundberg's theory is that radioactive substances tend to work their way up to the surface from deep within the earth.

They are stopped by an oil or gas deposit (which accounts for the low intensity above it) and reach the surface beyond its edge.

Oil prospectors are closemouthed about their operations (Texaco does not tell Gulf), but Lundberg says that his scintillometer surveys in various parts of the world "are running, to our amazement, a little less than 50% right."

* An instrument containing a material that gives flashes of light when radiation passes through it.

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