Mineral oil has been prominent at home and abroad. The
disposal of the Iraq supplies has been settled for the time, greatly to the advantage of that country's revenues, which will benefit long before those who have spent £4,000,000 already upon the wells. The French, to whom we made generous promises after the War, should be pleased that a branch pipe is to carry half the oil to Tripolis, the roadstead in Syria. The other half will come to Haifa within the sphere of the British Mandate. It must still be some years before this new source of petroleum increases the world's available supplies. At home Lord Rutherford's speech in the Upper House last week dealt with the prospects of producing oil from our coal. He is in favour of extraction by hydrogenation rather than by low-temperature cartionization. Neither process would be financially profitable until the price of foreign oils rose. Independence of those sources may be worth paying for, although highly imaginative, or for- getful, Americans have been known to complain that the British Empire kept a selfish. " monopoly " of oil 1 * * *
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