BOARD00198

• Board Meeting Date: 1/15/1969
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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allocation cost of $17 million will be repaid
with interest. This also poses a problem. I
do not profess to have any expertise in the
field of oil shale development. However, in
recent years events have occurred which appear
to have the effect of setting back the oil
shale development that we once thought would
occur in the immediate future.

About ten years ago this Board employed
consultants to make a thorough survey of the
oil shale problem and the water requirements
for the potential industry. It was believed
at that time that the oil shale development
would take place in a major form by about
1975. In recent years there has been in-
creased interest in off-shore oil development
which we did not contemplate at the time the
report was prepared. This off-shore oil devel-
opment is occurring primarily in the Pacific
Ocean along the California coastline in the
Gulf of Mexico. The basis of the report made
to us about ten years ago was that the oil
reserves in the united States were being
rapidly depleted and that no major reserves
were known to exist.

First there has come this off-shore oil
and secondly, and more important, there has
developed what is now believed to be the
largest oil field in the United States in the
State of Alaska. It may be that the oil re-
serves in Alaska will exceed the fields in
east Texas, which to date has been the largest
field in the United States, but which has now
been substantially depleted.

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If the assumptions are correct about the
Alaskan oil field, and there seems to be
every indication that they are correct, this
will bring into the picture, as I understand
it, somewhere around three billion barrels of
oil reserves which we did not contemplate in
our recent survey. What I am saying is that
the picture for the immediate development of