Six regions in the Province of Quebec are geologically favorable for exploration of oil and gas. Very little is known about one of them, the 1,500-square-mile area of flat Devonian (?) rocks just south of James Bay.

The St. Lawrence Lowlands region, about 10,000 square miles in extent, has gently folded Cambrian and Ordovician formations attaining a total thickness of nearly 10,000 feet.

Anticosti Island, near the mouth of the St. Lawrence has an area of about 3,000 square miles. It is underlain by low-dipping Ordovician and Silurian strata, the total exposed thickness of which ranges from 1,500 to 4,000 feet. No drilling has been done on the Island, and there has been only reconnaissance geological mapping.

No drilling for oil and gas has been done, either, in the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian rocks that form the Magdalen Islands, a small archipelago in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

In the Gaspe region, between two belts of highly disturbed Ordovician rocks, there is a central zone, with an area of about 5,000 square miles, where from 5,000 to probably as much as 20,000 feet of Silurian and Devonian strata are arranged in a series of large anticlinal and synclinal folds. Recent surface mapping is showing that this central Silurian-Devonian belt continues several miles westward beyond the limits of Gaspe Peninsula proper.

Oil seepages and petroliferous strata have been observed in all these regions excepting possibly, Magdalen Island. Gas, in notable although not as yet commercial quantities, has been found in several of the wells drilled in the St. Lawrence Lowlands region. Further testing is required to determine if the formations in themselves possess persistent zones of porosity or if the gas occurrences are related to fracture zones. Oil has been found in several wells in Gaspe, but commercial production has not been obtained yet; most of the wells drilled in this region, however, were either poorly located structurally or did not go deep enough to reach all possible favorable zones.

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