Secondary Recovery of Petroleum 789 



of all wells should be planned so that they may be utilized to the greatest 

 advantage as soon as the need for pressure maintenance or for secondary- 

 recovery operations becomes evident. 



In order to apply secondary recovery or pressure maintenance effec- 

 tively and economically, the unitization or cooperative development and 

 operation of oil fields is usually necessary. This objective cannot be at- 

 tained as long as state laws permitting the unitization of oil and gas fields 

 are either inadequate or lacking and as long as operators are liable for 

 violations of antitrust laws if they join a unit or cooperative project. 



Nothing can be gained by advocating the application of methods for 

 increasing oil recovery as long as they may place the operator in legal 

 jeopardy, and it is certainly desirable that the executives and legislatures 

 of the various oil-producing states should be acquainted with this fact. 

 Opposition to laws permitting unit operations is based usually on either 

 ignorance or avarice, for so far as the author has been able to determine 

 there are no unsuccessful unitization agreements where commercial oil 

 production has been developed. This being the case, the facts concerning 

 the general success of unitized operations should receive wide publicity 

 so that the objections to unitization resulting from ignorance may be elim- 

 inated. Likewise, it seems clear that the oil industry and the states must 

 cooperate to remove the nuUifying effects that may be imposed by a selfish 

 minority, who will purposely obstruct a program of unquestioned conser- 

 vation designed for the common good of a field solely for the nuisance 

 value it can create. 



Although the production of synthetic liquid fuels may have some 

 limiting influence on future secondary-recovery activity, it seems more 

 probable that the cost of finding and producing oil by primary methods 

 will continue for a considerable period to be the more important factor 

 in controlling the extent of application of secondary methods. 



