ABSTRACT

In spite of being the cradle of the American oil industry, the Appalachian Basin has by no means enjoyed the advanced and organized technological progress in either exploration or exploitation to the degree so common to most other petroleum provinces of the United States. This is particularly true of governmental administration as exhibited by the fact that there are no state laws regulating the spacing of wells, registration of data, proration of production, or satisfactory plugging of abandoned wells. West Virginia is an exception on the latter point, having laws requiring the erection of concrete monuments to mark all abandoned well sites. The inertia engendered by the lack of aggressive exploratory activity is illustrated by the fact that only the margins of the basin have any appreciable number of pre-Silurian tests, and of that number, very few have been located on the basis of thorough scientific investigation.

The cardinal and ruling factors for the accumulation of hydrocarbons here are porosity and permeability. It is a safe estimate that seventy per cent of the sediment covering all of the basin is excellent source material so that what remains to be determined is the location of reservoir rock with less emphatic

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preoccupation as to structural traps, except in the broadest sense. In most of the basin, excluding that portion marked by glacial till, the structures evident at the surface have been excellently mapped and have served as the predominant guiding factor for the location of exploratory wells. The fact that the Appalachian Basin is most strategically located with respect to markets will increase demands geometrically in the coming decades.