Geologists and other members of the oil and gas industry's exploration and production team have the continuous job of improving their performance to the end that oil and gas are found and produced in adequate quantities at the lowest possible cost at all times--good or bad. Satisfaction of estimated future demand calls for outstanding performance on their part, particularly in the United States. Fear that our resources and resourcefulness may be inadequate to the task diminishes--even evaporates--once the basic lesson history teaches has been learned. That lesson is not to underestimate the magnitude of the world's mineral resources and, further, not to underestimate man's ability to capture them and put them to use.

Growth in the importance of geologists to exploration seems definitely assured as the more obvious prospects are taken out of circulation, leaving a generally deeper, more disseminated, and altogether more baffling hunting ground with which to cope. Countless exploratory problems which are basically geological, to be solved by geologists, pervade the present scene and are destined to multiply as time passes.

Leadership by geologists throughout the exploratory process is mandatory. 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--applied geology--becomes the newest.