MINING GEOLOGY 
351 
barrels. This is nearly 125 millions of barrels more than the 
country produces. World perspective is vital. 
At the recent engineering congress on the petroleum industry, 
held in Kansas City, the subject of oil reserves came in for 
wrapt attention. Doctor White’s remarks were most pertinent. 
Whether or not his estimates were entirely too conservative as 
many believed is not at point now. His figure for the total oil 
possibilities in the world was placed at seventy billions of barrels. 
Granting that this estimate is much too small, it furnishes a good 
basis for later and closer calculations. His further figures were 
forty-three billions of barrels for the amount found in regions of 
earth in which oil has been already proved to exist in commercial 
quantities. 
With the United States supplying two-thirds of the yearly out¬ 
put, the other one-third is furnished by Mexico, Argintina, Bo¬ 
livia, Colombia, and Venezuela, South Russia, Eastern Siberia, 
Persia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Arabia, India, China, Japan, and 
the East Indies. The developed oil districts of these widely sep¬ 
arated regions are undoubtedly a very insignificant part of the 
total possible fields that will eventually be brought into market. 
Geological oil discovery is yet only in its infancy. 
“In the United States we have at the present moment produced 
a total of five and one-half billion barrels of oil. We have, there¬ 
fore, used up more than one-third of our estimated original heri¬ 
tage of oil. Contrasted with our more than five per cent rate of 
annual depletion, the rest of the world withdrew in 1921 not 
much over 280 millions from its store of over sixty billion barrels, 
or less than one-half of one per cent of its reserve recoverable by 
present methods. In other words, the reserves of the rest of the 
world would stand the present rate of drain for over two centuries. 
From the standpoint of the world distribution of oil and the 
economic relations of dur reserves to those of the rest of the world, 
an error of two or three billion barrels — four to six years’ supply 
— in the estimate of the oil reserves of the United States, is com¬ 
paratively insignificant. 
“The cooperative committee expressly affirms that not all the 
oil-pools in the United States will have been discovered a genera¬ 
tion hence. On the other hand, the committee takes great pains 
