Wallace Pratt

Wallace Everette Pratt was an American petroleum geologist who helped transform oil exploration from a speculative, hit-or-miss undertaking into a discipline grounded in systematic geological science. Working for Humble Oil and Refining Company and later Standard Oil, he applied subsurface geological analysis and helped establish geophysics as a standard tool of oil exploration, work considered influential enough that Standard Oil later named an oil tanker after him. Pratt also wrote extensively on petroleum resources and became well known for his view that oil is found in the minds of men, meaning that geological insight, not luck, produces discoveries. Away from the oil industry he was instrumental in helping establish Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas.