All for Oil

For any of the oil-hungry nations of the Western Hemisphere, a new find even remotely like Venezuela's bountiful Lake Maracaibo area would be the joyous national equivalent of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. Last week, in nine countries within 1,500 miles of Maracaibo, the quest for black gold was on more earnestly than ever before, with U.S. oilmen leading the pack. In rain forests and cane fields, dozens of drilling rigs probed for the telltale "show" of oil.

Many a costly hope was placed in Central America, spurred by Union Oil Co.'s discovery in Costa Rica last September of the first oil ever found in quantity between Mexico and the South American mainland. That well quickly flooded with salt water, but Union will drill two more, and Costa Rica is enacting a liberal oil code. Because the Costa Rican discovery was right on the border of Panama, which already had an inviting oil law, six U.S. firms hurried there. All of Panama has been let out on exploratory concessions, and three test wells drilled.

On the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, a U.S. independent firm has had as many as 200 men at work, and planned to bring in an offshore drilling barge. Houston's John W. Mecom and three associates were drilling a pair of exploratory wells in Honduras. In Guatemala, where 29 U.S. companies bid for exploration rights after the government of President Carlos Castillo Armas passed what oilmen called a "tough but workable" law, the process of sorting out overlapping concessions was going on, but no drilling had yet begun.

The tin hat of the wildcatter was also abundantly seen in the West Indies. Cuba, which spudded in its first oil well in 1954 and is now a small producer, brought up enough oil this year to supply its own needs for about two weeks. Cuba's biggest investor, Standard Oil Co. (Indiana), was also drilling two exploratory wells in Jamaica, where its wildcatting rights cover the whole island. In Haiti, Oilman Mecom and an associate drilled three dry holes, but plan to try again.

At the southern sweep of the big semicircle centered on Maracaibo, Peru was redoubling an oil search in its eastern jungles; Texas Petroleum Co. last week reached the 10,700-ft. level in its third test well on the Maranon River. Peru put particularly heavy hopes on the prospects in the trans-Andean jungle. Only last month the government sadly announced that not a drop of oil had been found in four years of drilling the once-promising Sechura Desert on the Pacific Coast. Though still a producer (from the waning field at Talara), Peru will have to import oil soon unless new fields are found.

Understandably, all the areas under exploration hold high hopes for a bonanza, and in general their oil laws, dropping the oil-is-ours nationalism of the past, invite exploration. But there was a sobering reminder in the failure to find oil in Peru's Sechura region: the normal signs may all be favorable, but you never can tell until someone with plenty of money and know-how gives it a good, hard try.

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