Geologists and other scientists and engineers on the exploration team have the continuous job of improving their performance to the end that oil and gas are found in adequate quantities at the lowest possible cost at all times--come boom or bust. Nobody can know what the future holds, but if present forecasts of domestic and foreign demand for oil and gas down the line materialize, outstanding growth in exploration and production technology is a necessity. Fear that such (or larger) demand cannot be satisfied evaporates once the basic lesson history teaches has been learned. That lesson is our unfortunate tendency to underestimate the magnitude of the world's mineral resources, and further to underestimate man's ability to capture them and use them.

Growth in the importance of geologists to the exploratory process seems definitely assured as the more obvious prospects are taken out of circulation leaving deeper, more far-flung, and altogether more baffling hunting grounds with which to cope. As time passes, geologists will be called upon to make a greater contribution to the exploratory process than they have in the past.

Rocky Mountain geologists have a goodly piece of the domestic hunting grounds as well as a fair cross section of the oil- and gas-finding problems. These include the discovery of fields at great depths, in unusual structural traps, and, in particular, in stratigraphic traps. In effect, the area is a hand specimen of the finding problems of the future. The opportunity of advancing the art of discovery while maintaining or even increasing the area's position in the domestic industry is ever present. Success can hardly be achieved, however, unless Rocky Mountain geologists lead exploratory thinking and action and do not "pass the buck" to the geophysicists and Dad Joiners.

More geology, more imaginative geology, and more geology in geophysics, coupled with more wildcat drilling, will produce surprising results--surprising on the right side of the ledger. The oldest scientific finding tool--geology--becomes the newest, not only in the Rockies but elsewhere.

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