Los Banos Rotary Club History
Oil Industry Man Explains Need For Conservation Law

Speaking before the Los Banos Rotary Club Tuesday noon and the Lions Club Tuesday evening, Robert Flaherty, of the conservation department of the Richfield Oil Corporation, combined visual with oral presentation to explain the need of a California law that would provide means of securing fullest development of California's oil fields.

Pointing out that oil is an exhaustible resource and that once used it is gone forever Flaherty said that while development of new fields in California has increased only 18 per cent since 1940, demand for oil products has increased 100 per cent in the same period. "The need for conservation of this vital natural resource," he said, "begins underground, and it is imperative that California takes steps immediately to insure that our oil resources are developed to the very fullest extent."

To do this, Flaherty explained, by aid of visual charts and demonstrative equipment, a plan that is already in use in many states in which all landowners over an oil field share cooperatively in the production of such field. The plan would compel participation by minority landowners if the majority voted to put such a plan in operation.

In uncontrolled production, Flaherty pointed out, it becomes a mad rush to develop and pump the producing wells while at the same time vital gas fields nearby are being tapped and relieved of pressure which, under proper programming, would otherwise remain underground to force all oil in such field into the region of the producing wells. As underground oil is a flowing commodity that cannot be controlled by property lines or fences, full development, Flaherty said, can come only from centralized control of the entire field, even to the point of pumping water under pressure into dry holes that were drilled adjacent to the oil pool but which failed to tap the pool itself. In such instances the landowner over the dry hole would likewise share in the oil production of his neighbor's producing well.

In some instances Flaherty declared, unmanaged production from an oil pool has resulted in the permanent loss to the country of as much as 75 per cent of the field's total capability. An example of this is in the Dome pool at Huntington Beach, where vast quantities of oil have been lost by lack of a compulsory management program.

Flaherty urged his listeners to take a personal and selfish interest in the problem by using their influence to the end that proper enabling legislation might be enacted by the state legislature to correct the present situation.

June 10, 1955

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