Identifier: bulletinuni10211919unit (find matches)
Title: Bulletin - United States National Museum
Year: 1877 (1870s)
Authors: United States National Museum Smithsonian Institution United States. Dept. of the Interior
Subjects: Science
Publisher: Washington : Smithsonian Institution Press, (etc.) for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt Print. Off.
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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tes, and she naturally has no built-upand tried-out machinery for solving It. The average person in this country to-day, orlet us say a year ago, apparently looked upon a mineral resource (if he considered itat all) as a clay bank, inexhaustible and to be dug Into at will. Consequently, to carrythe figure further, our ideas of resource administration as reflected In public policy are-excellent for clay-bank resources (and we have some of that kind; 1. e., cement, build-ing stone, sand, clay, etc.), but not suitable for those more limited and elusive minerals-that must be wrested from the depths of the earth. It would appear that complete exhaustion could be achieved by destroying Inhibitingeconomic conditions; that is, by means of extreme measures of socialiaation, such a»fixing a price under a system of forced production. 56 BULLETIN 102, VOL. 1, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. I APPALACHIAN UNA-INDIANA ILLINOIS KAN5A5-OKLAH0MAKORTH TEXAS noniHYi EST Lou\s)M^euur COAST ROCKY MOUNTAIN
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CALtFORNIA Pig. 8.—^Thb relative output of the principal oil fields of the United States from 1900THROUGH 1917. Note the dominant positions held bt the Kansas-Oklahoma and Cali- BH)BNIA fields. DaTA FROM U. S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY. PETROLEUM. 57 development presages a time, soon to arrive if not already here, whenthe present rate of production can no longer be sustained in its fullvigor. Just so soon as the aggregate output is compounded of senileand youthful fields, with the latter no longer in the ascendency, theresource as a whole will pass inevitably into a period of slowing andmore costly production, even though the resource is yet but halfexhausted.^ The period of economic stress, then, waits merely on thisconcatenation of circumstances, by no means upon a marked physicalexhaustion of the resource. WHAT PETROLEUM EXHAUSTION MEANS.

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