THE ENERGY RESOURCES—COAL, OIL, GAS (AND ASPHALT)


	( e )	Practically all continental or fresh-water deposits; relic seas, so long as they are partly salty, and saline lakes are excluded from this classification.
	( f )	Practically all marine formations that are thick and uniform in rock character and that are devoid of interbedded dark shales, thin-bedded dark impure limestones, dark marls, or thin-bedded limy and fossiliferous sandstones.
	( g )	Practically all oceanic abyssal deposits; these, however, are but rarely present on the continents.
2.	Possible petroliferous areas.
	( a )	Highly folded marine and brackish water strata younger than the Jurassic, but more especially those of Cenozoic time.
	( b )	Cambrian and Ordovician unfolded strata.
	( c )	Lake deposits formed under arid climates that cause the waters to become saline; it appears that only in salty waters (not over 4 per cent?) are the bituminous materials made and preserved in the form of kerogen, the source of petroleum; some of the Green River (Eocene) continental deposits (the oil shales of Utah and Colorado) may be of saline lakes.
3.	Petroliferous areas.
	( a )	All marine and brackish water strata younger than the Ordovician and but slightly warped, faulted, or folded; here are included also the marine and brackish deposits of relic seas like the Caspian, formed during the later Cenozoic. The more certain oil-bearing strata are the porous thin-bedded sandstones, limestones, and dolomites that are interbedded with black, brown, blue, or green shales. Coal-bearing strata of fresh-water origin are excluded. Series of strata with disconformities may also be petroliferous, because beneath former erosional surfaces the top strata have induced porosity and therefore are possible reservoir rocks.
	( b )	All marine strata that are, roughly, within 100 miles of former lands; here are more apt to occur the alternating series of thin and thick-bedded sandstones and limestones interbedded with shale zones.

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