Principles and Problems of Oil Prospecting in the Gold Coast Country ? Discussion

THE CHAIRMAN (A. F. Lucas, Washington, D. C.).-Mr. Matteson has stated that the drilling of certain deep wells has proved a failure because they were abandoned too soon. He advises drilling more wells around salt domes, in the hope of finding additional oil sands. I have had some experience on the domes and believe that by drilling shallow wells, one loses time and money. I have advanced the opinion -that by drilling central wells in the -most likely location of a dome, showing is certain weakness, a better result could be obtained. I have in mind one locality where Mr. Knapp drilled a well through the salt¬the only location that I know of on the Gulf Coast where oil was found underneath the salt. Mr. Knapp found a great deal of gas in it. The salt itself was impregnated with oil and gas; and my opinion is that in such instances, instead of drilling so many wells around a dome, if you will attack at a weak point to as great a depth as a drill will go, the results will he much better. At present we have instances where drills have penetrated to 7300 or 7400 ft. in depth. Why couldn't the rich companies that are operating around the Gulf Coast arrange to get some special drilling apparatus and drill with the rotary first for, say, 3000 to 4000 ft., always in the likely location, and then proceed with the cable? I think we need just such work. In Mr. Matteson's paper lie quotes from an author whose writings in the Federal Bulletin and in the Louisiana Bulletins have been quite extensive. He states that oil and asphalt have originally been found on the surface of those domes. I have been over and examined nearly all of those domes (not all of them, because many have been developed in the last few years) and found no such occurrence at the time; and in the old well-known humps or big hills, as they generally called them; I have never found either salines or asphalt or petroleum. In only' one instance it looked as though asphalt night have exuded out of the ground, and that was in the Sour Lake, but right in that neighborhood years previous to that a company had operated commercially-they had a little refinery there-and had found it so unprofitable that they pulled up stakes and quit.