"At present more petroleum is being produced than is necessary for the demands of the industry. Within ten years the present fields will be unable profitably to produce enough for these requirements. The only direction in which production can be checked is with the petroleum contained in public lands.
"Offering such public lands for entry at a low price is nothing more than temptation to the private citizen to waste petroleum by over production, since lands yielding hundreds of dollars per acre in this product can be obtained for a small sum. Every acre of public land, believed to contain petroleum or natural gas, should be withdrawn from public sale and leased under conditions that regulate production.
"Its use for power is justified on the Pacific coast, if used in gas-producer engines."
ALCOHOL
As a substitute for other fuels, wood, or denaturated alcohol, will probably come into greater use each year, and is regarded by many as the great fuel of the future, because the materials of which it is made are waste vegetable products and will always be plentiful.
It is made from cellulose, the woody part of plants, and may be manufactured from sawdust when freshly cut from live trees, from small, and refuse potatoes, from inferior grain that is not worth marketing, and from low-grade fruits and vegetables of all kinds. It is even said that the hundreds of acres of sage-brush in the West that have always been considered worse than useless can be made into wood-alcohol and thus become a valuable product.
It can be used for any purpose that gasolene can, although a different style burner is required. It must be made much hotter before it is changed into vapor, and on account of this it has been difficult to make satisfactory burners for all the kinds of heating, lighting, and power work; the machinery being far from perfect as yet. Wood-alcohol can not yet be made cheaper than gasolene, and is not so easy to burn, so that it is slow in reaching an important place in the industrial world; but gas and gasolene prices will advance, and better methods of manufacturing and burning alcohol will be found, and then we shall have a fuel that can take the place of either coal or petroleum for lighting or power.
It is thought that wood-alcohol will be of especial use to the farmer, since he has so many waste vegetable products, has so much need of power in small quantities and is far from the sources of public service power, such as electric and gas plants. Alcohol-driven motors can be used to take the place of the labor of both horses and men on the farm. On level farms they can run the heavy machines, such as mowers, reapers, and binders, plows and cultivators. On any farm they may be used to run stationary engines, to chop and grind food for live stock, to pump water, churn, run sewing-machines, operate fans, drive carriages and wagons and do many other things.
Wood-alcohol produces ammonia as a by-product, is used in the manufacture of dyes and coal-tar products, of smokeless powder, of varnishes, and of imitation silks made from cotton.