Support from industry, while not inconsiderable, has been directed primarily toward undergraduate scholarships. This aid has been of value in that it has helped maintain a sort of status quo with regard to undergraduate enrollment-it has not been of great value in the areas of graduate work and research. The fact is that major petroleum companies, unlike those of the other extractive industries, have large and active research laboratories of their own; they need not be directly interested in maintaining levels of research at educational institutions. A basic problem is, of course, the shortage of petroleum engineering graduates. This factor, more than any other, accounts for the fact that the enrollment of American citizens in graduate programs is so low. The anomalous situation, of course, is that foreign governments are sufficiently aware of the importance of this area of work to offer financial support to their student engineers while this country is not. AREAS OF SPECIAL PROBLEMS There are many areas of concern in the petroleum engineering education and research sectors. Several of those are discussed below. (1) The General State of the Educational Units.-It is worth pointing out that several departments and options have ceased to operate in the past several years. Included in this list are North Dakota University, University of Houston and Oklahoma State University while the University of Pittsburgh will abandon the field in June 1971. Practically no department or option in the country is showing marked growth at a time when the energy and fuel picture of the nation shows need of energetic action and study. By any measure, the present prognosis for the discipline can only be considered to be bleak. (2) Future Supplies of Oil and Gas.-According to a study by the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation this nation's energy consumption since 1965 has been rising at a rate of 5% per year. One study revealed the use of 71 quadrillion B.T.U. in 1970; of this total 23.8 quadrillion were derived from natural gas and 31.4 quadrillion from oil. A forecast for 1980 predicts the use of 105.8 quadrillion B.T.U. of which 23.8 will be supplied by gas and 47.9 by oil. The increased demands will put extreme pressure on the technology and the industry. The present situation is that the proved reserves of oil in the United States are 39 billion barrels of oil and 291 trillion cubic feet of gas. Proved reserves are those quantities which can be economically produced with present-day technology. The potential reserves are 432 billion barrels and 1,543 trillion cubic feet respectively. The potential reserves include the oil from shales which cannot be produced economically at this time. Moreover, production of shale oil involves (1) strip mining and (2) the production of literally mountains of waste material. two considerations which are obviously unsound in view of the present trend of concern for the environment and the ecology. Outside sources of supply are questionable-Venezuela has limited capacity, the Middle East is politically unstable and an optimistic assumption of supply from the North Slope in 1980 amounts to only 2,000,000 barrels per day. The most reasonable source of energy from oil and gas is from existing fields in this country. The problem is the production of the required volumes from existing fields. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania illustrates the supply situation rather well in that the industry of the Commonwealth provides a scale model of the industry in general. The petroleum industry in Pennsylvania produced 4.5 million barrels of petroleum in 1969--the proved reserves were 54.7 million barrels at that time and cumulative production through 1969 was 1.265 billion barrels. In the year 1955, however, Pennsylvania produced 8,505,000 barrels of premium quality petroleum and had proved reserves in excess of 93 million barrels of oil. In other words, this areas has lost one half of its producing capacity in a period of fifteen years. It is apparent that a comparable decline in the next fifteen years could well cause the industry to cease to function in this part of the country. The Penn Grade Crude Oil Association, however, estimates that over half of the original oil in place in Pennsylvania remains unrecovered in existing reservoirs. This being so, there exist over a billion barrels of Penn Grade oil of which 54.7 million barrels can be economically recovered (with little or no danger to the environment) with present technology. The inference cannot be made to extend these figures to all parts of the nation although the basic problem, i.e. a lack of technology to produce in-place reserves economically, applies to all parts of the country. (3) Lack of a National Research Policy.-There does not exist a national research policy with regard to minerals in general and fossil fuels in particular. Research in the Bureau of Mines has not been notably effective. What is needed is a broad-based research policy beyond the scope of the Bureau-to attempt to solve increasingly urgent problems in the minerals area. Specific problems should be attacked in the oil and gas sections; some of these are listed below: (a) A comprehensive evaluation of present and future producing capacities. (b) A long-range study of the physical characteristics of oil sands and their interactions with fluids. (c) Study of the factors governing flow in carbonate reservoirs. (e) A feasability study of (1) the wide-scale disposal of liquid and gaseous waste materials in deep sands. (f) Development of methods of the production of shallow high-viscosity oils. (g) Study of the possible disposition of thermal pollution in deep reservoirs. (h) The possible use of waste heat to increase oil production from low permeability reservoirs. (i) Long-range study of the dislocation of traditional sources of supplyi.e. what will occur when the present supply of Eastern gas is depleted? (j) Research in gas storage techniques-this procedure is certain to grow in importance. (k) Research in the storage of LNG-ultimately the East Coast will be heavily dependent on LNG and storage will be required. How can it best be done? These and other specific problems should be attached now if the country is not to become almost totally dependent on external supplies of oil and gas in the future. There exist, however, two basic problems. The first and more pressing is technical manpower. An adequate research program to handle even a portion of the required work would require more personnel than are presently being trained. The second problem is, of course, continuing funding-the traditional sources of support are in no way capable of funding a research program of the required magnitude. RECOMMENDATIONS The implementation of a national research policy in support of mineral engineering education and research with the establishment of university-based research centers is highly recommended. We strongly support any legislation of this kind. PROBLEMS OF MINERAL INDUSTRIES RESEARCH (By J. D. Ridge) At the present time, the fraction of U.S. metal requirements that is obtained from abroad is almost always appreciable and often is very large. Only for Molybdenum is the fraction essentially zero. For copper it is about 30 per cent; for lead it is 33 per cent; for zinc 60 per cent; for iron ore over 33 per cent; for nickel about 90 per cent; for manganese almost 100 per cent; for chromite essentially 100 per cent; for mercury slightly less than 40 per cent; and for platinum over 90 per cent. The purchase of all these metallic raw materials causes a sizeable addition to our unfavorable balance of payments, and our failure to produce them here results in a loss of jobs for American workers. For some of these materials, nickel, chromite, manganese, and platinum for example, no matter how much geologic exploration is carried out, major U.S. deposits probably will not be found. Nevertheless, exploitable deposits of these metals have been known in this country in the past, and more probably could be developed if sufficient research were carried out on the problems of finding, mining, and upgrading the ores. For those metallic materials for which we mine domestically a major portion of our needs, further research in the areas of discovery, exploitation, and beneficiation undoubtedly would result in our being able to produce an even larger fraction of our needs than we do today. The nation abounds in examples of mines that, though far from exhausted, have been shut down because they cannot compete with the products of foreign deposits. Obviously, this has been done because these mines cannot make a profit with the methods in use and the prices paid. Successful research in many instances probably could put these mines back on a paying basis if they have not been closed so long that the work of returning them to production would not cost more than new methods would save. Examples of such mines include: (1) the hematite mines of the Birmingham, Alabama district; (2) the magnetite mines of the Dover, New Jersey area; (3) most of the fluorite mines of the Southern Illinois-Kentucky fluorspar district; (4) the tungsten mines of Nevada such as Mill City, Oreana, and Silver Dyke and the inactive mines of the Bishop area that lies on both sides of the Nevada-California line; (5) the copper deposits of eastern Vermont; (6) the copper deposits of the Foothills belt of California; (7) the chromite mines of Oregon; (8) the closed primary iron mines of the various districts of the Lake Superior area; (9) the tungsten mines in northern North Carolina; (10) the Gossan Lead of western Virginia; (11) the lead-zinc mines of central Pennsylvania that have not been worked since just after the Civil War; (12) the iron mines of northern New York State; (13) the zinc-lead mines of southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois; and (14) the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania. Most of the research work to be done on such deposits as these would be in the disciplines of mining and mineral beneficiation, but many of the areas probably contain additional deposits of the types already known, and these could be found if more sensitive and sophisticated methods of exploration were discovered. With the mines already known, however, the problems of putting them back in operation are mainly those of developing improved methods of mining and beneficiation. In most instances, such research would have to be pointed toward largerscale mining methods that would produce lower-grade ores that would require significantly better methods of removing waste than now are available. Work of this type is usually of too long-range a character to be conducted by the mining companies themselves and requires consistent efforts by men whose background includes both theoretical and practical experience in their own field and a real understanding of the problems of the miner or mineral beneficiation man with whom he must cooperate if his results are to be soundly applied to the problems of reopening mines of the types previously enumerated. These problems are discussed in detail in the report of the Committee of Mineral Science and Technology that was published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1969. The chairman of that committee was Dr. E. F. Osborn, then of Penn State and now Director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. The summary on pages 30 to 39 of that report is particularly pertinent to these problems. The country, however, will never have enough of the minerals it needs, and more must be found at at least a constant, and preferably an accelerated. rate. Our current methods of prospecting, particularly by geochemical and geophysical means, need a great deal of improvement so that they can find deposits now covered by greater thicknesses of rock or alluvium than can be penetrated by our present equipment. Research should be carried on in this field on a large scale, and employment in this area should be stepped up considerably by the development of mineral industries research institutes. In many instances, chemists and physicists who have lost their jobs through contraction in such fields as the spaceoriented industries could be given additional training that would enable them to make very real contributions to the geochemical and geophysical aspects of prospecting. In addition to the problems that could be solved by research in the areas of prospecting, mining, and mineral beneficiation, further work is needed in the field of extractive metallurgy. For example, at the Sanford Lake iron-titanium mine in central New York State, huge tonnages of magnetite concentrates that are too high in titanium to be used in the production of pig iron and too low in titanium to be titanium ore are now stockpiled. A method of separating these two elements in mineral would release valuable amounts of both. Deposits of valuable materials are known in many party of this country that even greatly improved methods of mining probably will not convert into ore mineable by conventional methods. Nevertheless, it is possible that these metals can be recovered by leaching techniques if the rock is, or can be, sufficiently broken to permit thorough penetration of the deposits by leaching solutions. Much copper, for example, is recovered from waste dumps by leaching processes at very low cost, and such methods probably, with sufficient additional study, can be so modified as to work underground. In this area, further work is needed to find if the explosion of nuclear devices at depth can break ground sufficiently for leaching to be effective and still be so carried out that dangers from radiation will not exist. In short, problems in need of study exist in all fields of mining technology, and these can be solved only if research is carried out on a large scale by highly qualified experimenters who have a flair for the practical applications of their theoretical knowledge. In all states, problems in the mineral field exist, and those in one state may well be quite different from those in another. Thus, a research institute in one state almost certainly would not be duplicating the work of another. UNITED STATES POSITION IN MINERAL RESOURCES, 1939 AND 1968 Values of mineral production (except petroleum products) by States in 1968 STATEMENT OF THOMAS V. FALKIE, HEAD, MINERAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT, AND CHAIRMAN, MINERAL ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT PROGRAM, COLLEGE OF EARTH AND MINERAL SCIENCES, THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. INTRODUCTION We are living in a mineral-oriented civilization in which the three basic ingredients for sustaining life and living standards are food, energy and agricultural and mineral raw materials. All of these depend upon mineral resource development to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, the mineral industry, like agriculture, is a basic industry. Agriculture, of course, is needed for food and depends on mineral-based fertilizers to enrich the soil and increase growth rates and yields. Even the diets of many of the world's cattle contain feed supplements made from minerals. More and more energy is needed to drive the wheels and assembly lines of industry and to provide electrical power for the earth's increasing population. A significant percentage of this energy comes from the fossil fuels (coal, ore and gas) and uranium (for nuclear power), and this percentage is rising steadily. Coal and uranium are products of mining, and gas and oil are also extracted from the earth's surface. There is hardly any nonliving thing. ranging from paint pigments and light bulb filaments to concrete and bricks, that is not made with or from mineral materials. Minerals occur geologically and their location cannot be controlled by man. The degree of economic development of a nation often is related to the degree of self-sufficiency or dependence in mineral wealth. The demand for these resources, which are non-renewable, is increasing at an enormous rate. For example, the world's energy requirements will triple by the year 2000. Similar increases are expected for metals, non-metallics, industrial minerals and agricultural minerals. Most mineral economists predict a total |