ABSTRACT
Although the conservation statutes of only a few states define waste to include damage to resources other than oil and gas, all of the regulating states undertake incidentally to avert or to limit such damage. All of them vest at least partial responsibility for protecting other resources in petroleum conservation commissions. The objective and the administrative approach stand ori their own merits, of course. Society has the same interest in conserving its other mineral, water, soil, wildlife, human, and capital resources as it has in conserving oil and gas; and established petroleum conservation commissions can most directly and cheaply control those activities of the petroleum industry conducive to external damages. For our purposes, however, the control of external damages through petroleum conservation commissions has additional significance. It tends to assure that oil and gas production bears its full social costs, and thus tends to satisfy one of the conditions of optimizing, from society's point of view, the rate of exploiting the total natural stock of petroleum resources. It is for this reason that the control of external damages merits detailed examination here. Such examination will both indicate the extent of regulatory effort and convey some sense of the general magnitude of the industry's compliance costs.
