The tremendous expanding demand for petroleum and its products that continues to develop means that we must take a hard look at where our future supply of petroleum is to be found. In spite of the fact that most exploration has been and is directed toward the search for petroleum in local structural traps, many of the largest oil and gas pools in the Western Hemisphere are trapped by non-structural phenomena. Structural traps are so obvious that they are the first to be tested. But we are now facing the situation where the supply of structural traps in the United States seems to be limited; untested anticlines are becoming more difficult to find. Does this indicate an impending shortage of petroleum? The answer would seem to be No--but this means the search will have to b for more obscure and subtle trapping situations. The search will continue for the purely structural trap, but there will be added stratigraphic variations and fluid-flow phenomena, all operating either together or independently.

We have "stumbled" into many great non-structural oil and gas pools while looking for purely structural traps, but the time seems to have arrived when we must start looking directly for combination traps of all kinds involving different proportions of structure, stratigraphic change, and fluid-flow phenomena. Such traps may contain very large petroleum pools as past experience has shown.

There are in the Rocky Mountain region many such untested potential combinations of large and broad structure, stratigraphic change, and favorable fluid-flow conditions to justify the belief in its continuing great future as a petroleum producing region of importance to our national needs. The fact that the Rocky Mountain Section is dedicating a full meeting to the obscure and subtle trap is a sure indication of a change in our thinking. Once we start actively looking for traps that combine structure, stratigraphic change, and fluid phenomena instead of looking only for local structure, there is no reason why discoveries in the United States should not continue to meet the demand. And the Rocky Mountain region has as bright a future for petroleum discovery as any other.

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