many years— something of a contrast to what one sees in the Mexican oil field. Old oil wells are being remade here and new machinery will be installed and new wells driven. Well number 36 on the side of Sulphur Mountain already furnishes a beautiful lubricating oil with gasolene and no asphalt. It is thirty-four gravity and is worth at the present time about two dollars per barrel, although most of the heavy oil in this district is worth about seventy-five cents a barrel.
Whether an oil well is large or small, the cost of oil production at the well cannot be over ten cents per barrel; and oil can be pumped one hundred miles at a cost of one cent a barrel.
The Pan-American people are at work on experiments to make a cheaper gasolene motor oil and also on improvements to the "cracking" process. Cracking oil is not a new invention but it is the basis of all the reports and promises from Washington for cheapening gasolene. A heavy crude oil is cracked by being heated to a temperature of eight hundred degrees under pressure with hot steam. Oil of eight and a half gravity is thus converted into an oil of sixteen gravity and will flow like water. In the process oxygen and hydrogen are separated and new
