FUTURE OF MAN — MATHER 221 



up. In startling contrast, the resources of the mineral kingdom are 

 nonrenewable; they are in the category of accumulated capital. 

 Petroleum and coal, copper and iron, lead and vanadium, these and 

 many other prerequisites of modern civilization have been accumu- 

 lated by nature through hundreds of millions of years of geologic 

 activity. Thanks to scientific research, man is exhausting that store 

 of mineral wealth in a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, 

 years. That inescapable fact is at rock bottom one of the most 

 fundamental causes of economic distress, of war between nations, 

 and of strife between classes. 



Fairly accurate estimates of the world stores of many nonrenew- 

 able resources are now available. Take petroleum as an illustration. 

 The known available reserves of petroleum beneath the surface of 

 the United States total at present approximately 17 billion barrels.^ 

 Experts differ in their guesses as to the quantity of petroleum that 

 may be discovered in the future in areas that have not yet been 

 adequately explored with the drill, or in known fields by discovery of 

 deeper reservoirs not yet reached by the deepest wells in those fields. 

 There are also many varying shades of optimism and pessimism 

 concerning the possibility of increasing materially the percentage 

 of recovery of the oil present in a reservoir rock when penetrated 

 by drilling operations. Estimates of the quantity to be added to 

 our petroleum reserves from those two sources range from 7 or 8 

 billion barrels to 15 or 20 billion. I would incline toward the larger 

 figures, considering them as maxima that are extremely unlikely 

 to be exceeded. On that basis, the present store of available petro- 

 leum beneath the surface of the United States is 25 to 35 billion 

 barrels. That is only about 30 times the annual domestic consump- 

 tion of petroleum in recent years. The average annual production 

 of petroleum in the United States during the 5 years from 1934 

 through 1938 was almost 1 billion 100 million barrels,* and the 1939 

 production exceeds 1^4 billion ban-els. At the present rate of with- 

 drawal, the domestic stores of this essential raw material would, 

 therefore, be exhausted in less than a third of a century. 



Data are not nearly so precise for the majority of foreign coun- 

 tries as for the United States. It is, however, fairly safe to con- 

 clude that the world stores of petroleum will last only something like 

 75 years at the present rate of withdrawal. With the possible ex- 

 ception of Mexico, no other country has been as successful as the 

 United States in the attempt to exhaust its petroleum resources in 

 the shortest possible period of time, but rapid progress toward that 

 result is now being made in many regions. 



' "Petroleum reserves are estimated by Institute committee at new record total," Amer. 

 Petroleum Inst. Quart., vol. 9, No. 2, p. 7, 1939. 

 ' Statistics from Minerals Yearbook, published annually by the U. S. Bureau of Mines. 



