ers are not usually
installed; instead, gas is sold by the month. The consumer is under no
obligation to save the gas, in fact, he usually acts on the common
American principle of wanting to get all he can for the money and so
burns his open tip lights, and open burner stoves day and night. The
factories waste in the same way, using open furnaces which are never
banked during the season because it is easier and costs no more.

This, it seems, should be the whole history of natural gas waste, but
the greatest source of loss still remains to be spoken of. In every gas
region of any importance oil is found sooner or later, usually after the
heaviest gas pressure has been exhausted; and the oil driller is the
greatest of all foes to the life of a natural gas region. He finds that
the gas interferes with the flow of oil, spraying it into the air and
causing loss, and that the danger of fire is much increased by its
presence. This frequently causes explosions, tearing out the side of the
well or blowing out the casing, and making the oil-well useless. The
surplus gas is usually piped to one side out of the reach of danger, and
then burned to get rid of it. Drillers often try to force the gas out in
the hope that it will be followed by a rush of oil.

This is the heaviest drain on the gas. In the Caddo field in Louisiana
alone the loss is seventy million cubic feet per day, enough to light
ten cities the size of Washington, D. C., and equal to ten thousand
barrels of petroleum per day. In Indiana a few years ago fourteen wells,
all within a space of a few acres in extent, were burned by oil drillers
continuously for six months, the light being visible twenty miles away.

Greater care in the management of the wells and slight additional
expense for casing are all that is required to stop the waste of gas
from oil wells and heavy pressure gas wells.

All of these wastes taken together constitute a fearful loss. In 1907,
more than 400,000,000 cubic feet were used and an almost equal number
wasted. In other words, the daily waste is over a billion cubic feet, or
enough to supply every city in the United States of over one hundred
thousand population.

The heating value of a billion feet of gas is equal to a million bushels
of coal. If some great conflagration were sweeping away our coal fields
steadily every day in the year, and destroying our best coal at the rate
of a million bushels per day, how quickly we should all arise