Staff members at the New Jersey State Archives recently discovered the following article on microfilm of the Monmouth Inquirer, July 16, 1916, before the U.S. entered World War I. It’s an interesting read 92 years later in view of current international fuel costs.
The article is titled, “Where gasoline has gone: Europe’s enormous demand for motor fuel explains scarcity and high prices.”
The article reads, “At the present rate of consumption the market demand for gasoline can hardly be supplied for another 20 years. We are literally facing a motorcar fuel famine, Waldemar Kaempffert writes in McClure’s.
Is it any wonder that gasoline costs more than 35 cents in Canada? That we are paying nearly as much? That gasoline may soon be worth 40 cents a gallon?
At once you ask, ‘Why not lift more oil from the earth and distill off the gasoline?’ Oil refiners would if they could.
The truth is that our oil fields are rapidly nearing exhaustion. New fields may be discovered, it is true, but the United States geological survey regards the most likely regions with no very optimistic eye. It may be that oil may be found in pockets still to be tapped in undeveloped parts of the globe — in Africa and the far east for example. But who would build industrial hopes on a mere chance? Besides, Europe looks to us for much of its airplanes and Zeppelins.
Before the war we produced more than 65 percent of the world’s output. We must be delivering more than our normal share to Europe now. In 1915 we sent enough gasoline abroad to supply 350,000 cars, and nearly all of it was shipped to France and England. Russia has her own pools into which she can dip with a generous hand. And Germany — what of Germany?
We read of Von Hindenburg shifting whole army corps by means of motorcars in a bleak Russian country threaded by railroads too few in number for his strategic purpose. Where did he obtain the gasoline? Partly from Romania (with pronounced Russian political affiliations) and partly from Galicia.”
Karl J. Niederer
Director of Division of Archives
and Records Management
New Jersey State Archives
Trenton