is only one-half of one per cent. Gas from the oil wells heats the oil to a temperature of three hundred and twenty-five degrees, and in the condensation the gasolene is drawn off. Some contracts with the Mexican Petroleum Company have run below sixty cents, but the average received at Tampico for a barrel of oil can be brought up to above ninety cents by the topping plant, which, when finished to top all the oil, will have cost far less than one million dollars. Across the river the Pierce Oil refinery takes in crude oil from the Mexican Petroleum Company and gets two per cent in beautiful paraffin cakes. In all there are thirty-five commercial products in petroleum, and they sub-divide into many more commercial uses.
There is a great future for Mexican oil in the refining business. There is yet more money now in the transportation and refining and merchandising of Mexican oil than there is in the value of the oil itself at the seaboard.
SHIPPING
The Mexican Petroleum Company has put more than twenty millions in cash into development within Mexico, and with its majority owner, the Pan-American Petroleum & Trans-
