MINERALS 243 



To control over-exploitation of oil on private lands, a sec- 

 tion of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 provided 

 that the production of oil should be limited to the demand. 

 Both state and federal agents tried to enforce this rule; but, 

 after a bitter struggle, it finally collapsed when the Supreme 

 Court decided in 1935 that the act as a whole was uncon- 

 stitutional. 



Today the production of oil is still controlled to some 

 extent by state laws and interstate compacts authorised by 

 Congress in 1935. The job of enforcing these compacts is diffi 

 cult, however. The problem on federal oil land is simpler be" 

 cause the government has kept the ownership of the land and 

 only rented the right to produce oil. However, oil from federal 

 lands is only about 3 per cent of the total produced, and the 

 reserves on this land are no more than 15 per cent of the total 

 in the country. 23 



Control of oil production on government land followed a 

 somewhat different pattern. First there was the withdrawal of 

 oil lands on public domain. The chief purpose of this was to give 

 the Geological Survey time to investigate this land, classify it, 

 and enable the government to decide which of it was really valu- 

 able. After this classification, the federal government passed 

 regulations whereby the valuable land was leased rather than 

 sold. This reserved for the people as a whole a certain amount 

 of the profit made from land which belonged to the people as a 

 whole. From this beginning a system of laws designed to regulate 

 the production of oil of federal lands has been developed. 



To put a stop to the terrific waste of oil and the natural gas 

 which is found with oil, the Secretary of the Interior, Ray 

 Lyman Wilbur, in 1931, arranged for what is known as a co 

 operative unit production of oil in the government owned Kettle- 

 man Hills field in California. The Director of the Geological 

 Survey got the producers to agree to produce the minimum 



23 Loc. cit. 



