PETROLEUM AND NATURAL GAS IN NEW YORK 399 



PETROLEUM AND NATURAL GAS IN NEW YORK 



CHAPTER 1 



ORIGIN AND ACCUMULATION OF OIL AND GAS 



The state of New York is comparatively poor in the two great 

 forms of stored power; namely, coal and petroleum. Its metes 

 and bounds were fixed long before the real value of coal could 

 be properly appreciated, and also long before its place in the 

 geologic scale had been determined, while as for petroleum 

 and its most important derivative, natural gas, both of them 

 continued to be regarded as nuisances to be abated rather than 

 as a possible source of wealth, till about the middle of the present 

 century. 



Within the established boundaries of this state a few square 

 miles of the rocks of the Carboniferous age are included in 

 Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties. These Carboniferous 

 rocks are found as outliers on the high hills at the head of the 

 present drainage systems and are obviously " remnants that re- 

 main " from and represent a great sheet that originally included 

 ail the outliers that we know and extended beyond them in all 

 directions. These outliers are all fragments of the great con- 

 glomerate, and none of them contain coal seams of economic 

 value. 



Section 1 



Geologic structure, as connected with the accumulation of oil 



and gas 



As for the accumulation of oil and gas we have learned that 

 they follow the great structural features of the strata in which 

 they are contained, which were established in them largely at 

 the time of the Appalachian revolution. No more important gen- 

 eralization has been established in this great section of economic 

 geology and none more abundantly supported than this; namely, 

 that oil, gas and water, the usual contents of buried porous 

 strata, have been separated from one another under the influence 

 of gravity and have been accumulated at different levels, in the 

 order of their specific gravities, by the same force. 



