No Oil Contrivance

Conferees Confer at Conference

Such, in effect, was the net result of the much-heralded oil conservation meeting held last week at famed Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs, on the call of President Hoover (TIME, June 10). Three hundred delegates attended. From eleven oil-producing States came Governors or their representatives. The U. S. was there in the persons of Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur and Mark Lawrence Requa, the meeting's chairman and the President's special representative. Nine billion dollars of the eleven-billion-dollar U.S. oil industry were actively represented. For three days the delegates wrestled with oil, deplored its waste, bewailed overproduction, hoped for improvement, disbanded without definite accomplishment.

President Hoover called the meeting in the hope that those attending it would contrive a means of reducing oil production, possibly by an interstate compact to be ratified by Congress. No such means was found. Instead, attention was focused upon differences within the oil industry which block the way to conservation. Two factors plainly caused the breakup:

1) The refusal of independent oil producers to enter any limitation agreement until a duty is placed upon petroleum imports. They contend that the major oil companies will reduce their domestic production only to increase their imports from Mexico and South America, thus nullifying the effect of any conservation agreement. In this position the independents were joined by Louisiana, to which most U. S. oil imports come. Crude oil imports are now about one-tenth of domestic production.

2) The refusal of public-land States, notably Wyoming, Montana. Utah and Colorado, to participate in any interstate conservation compact until the U. S. Government "substantially modifies" the order issued by President Hoover last March curtailing oil development leases and explorative drilling by permit on U. S. lands. These States, deprived of royalty oil revenue by the Hoover order, were in no co-operative mood at Colorado Springs.

Chairman Requa got the conference off to an awkward start when he said: "If and when the Government has made it possible for the industry to cooperate and conserve and that co-operation and conservation are not forthcoming, then no one will be more insistent than myself in urging rigid government coercive regulation." The word coercive brought the industry to its feet in instant protest.

Chairman Requa hastened to reply that his words had been taken "too literally." Said he: "Any thought of coercive legislation is unthinkable." But the word echoed unhappily. From Washington came Senatorial rumblings that any policy of coercion would be "bitterly repudiated."