LEAD STORY
RMAG CENTENNIAL Part I: The Early Years (1922-1947)
By Jane Estes-Jackson, Donna Anderson, and Matt Silverman
T
HE EARLY 20TH CENTURY MUST
1901-1902. By the middle of 1924, 50 rigs were busy drilling forty prospective structures in 16 Colorado counties. Over 35 oil companies had opened offices in Denver, establishing it as a prominent hub for the burgeoning petroleum industry. Petroleum geologists needed a local forum to network, exchange ideas, and hear about the latest innovations and discoveries. So, on January 26, 1922, fifty geologists came together at the Albany Hotel (Figure 3; NE corner of 17th and Stout, also the site of the Denver Oil Exchange) in Denver and founded the Rocky Mountain Association of Petroleum Geologists (RMAPG). Meetings were subsequently held on the first and third Thursday of the month and were “open to all persons interested in the petroleum industry.” The first technical program was held on February 9 when C.T. Lupton and L.R. Van Burgh gave a talk on “Pre-Cretaceous Stratigraphy of Western Kansas”. Three months later, in March of 1922, Max Ball, who was the first president of RMAPG, was elected as Vice President of AAPG. He invited AAPG to Denver for a regional meeting that October, which was the beginning of a long association between the two groups. AAPG was incorporated in the state of Colorado on April 21, 1924, by Max Ball, Charles Rath, and Charles Decker, all founding members of the
have been an exciting time to be a petroleum geologist. The discovery of the Augusta and El Dorado fields in Kansas in the mid 19-teens demonstrated that the anticlinal theory of petroleum accumulation was a successful exploration method, and innovative geologists quickly adopted it. Both the USGS and the Colorado Geological Survey sent numerous geologists out in the field to map surface anticlines throughout the western US, which directly resulted in the discovery of many large oil and gas fields in the Rocky Mountain region. Following the end of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic, the US saw a sustained period of great economic prosperity throughout the 1920s. The first big oil boom ensued when demand for oil rapidly increased concurrently with the rising popularity of the automobile, and petroleum geologists became indispensable to successful hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation.
FOUNDERS
Colorado has been an important petroleum province since oil was first commercially produced at Florence Field in 1881 (Figure 1), followed by discoveries at Boulder (Figure 2) and Rangely in
OUTCROP | January 2022
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Vol. 71, No. 1 | www.rmag.org
