300. Argument for Appellees. create or contribute to any nuisance or injury to the health, morals or comfort of anyone. And the sale and use prohibited, under the evidence, is without question the most profitable sale and use that can be made of the gas, and the one most beneficial to the world and to civilization. 2 Kent's Com. 320; Litchfield v. Bond, 186 N. Y. 66, 80; Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U. S. 60, 74; In re Kelso, 147 California, 609. The statute "does not alone regulate the right of the reduction to possession of the gas, but when the right is exercised, when the gas becomes property, takes from it the attributes of property, the right to dispose of it." Oklahoma v. Kansas Natural Gas Co., 221 U. S. 229, 254. So, too, the deprivation of the right to use the factory, or the imposition of restraints rendering such use impossible, is a taking of property in as real a sense as if the factory were physically appropriated. Dobbins v. Los Angeles, 195 U. S. 223; In re Smith, 143 California, 368. See also: Forster v. Scott, 136 N. Y. 577; People v. Otis, 90 N. Y. 48; Pumpelly v. Green Bay Co., 13 Wall. 166; Kansas City Gas Co. v. Kansas City, 198 Fed. Rep. 500. Oil is also a fuel, produced and transported under conditions substantially similar to natural gas. It is also an essential ingredient in printing inks, into the composition of which eight times as much oil as gas-black enters. The heating value of oil so used is totally lost. Would it be a reasonable exercise of police power to declare that oilor oil from certain wells-must not be sold for such use unless the heat contained in the oil be fully used for domestic or manufacturing purposes? Wood is a fuel-the oldest and most widely used of fuels. From wood is made news-print paper. Again the heat, or fuel value, is lost. Could it be deemed a reasonable exercise of police power to forbid the sale of wood to pulp mills unless the heat contained therein be fully employed for other uses? Argument for Appellees. 254 U.S. In each instance a fuel is consumed. Its heating value is lost. A product of great pecuniary and cultural value results. The manufacture of the product would be impossible except at the sacrifice of the heat. A requirement that it shall be preserved is unreasonable and destructive. Manifestly the contour and extent of the field or reservoir constituting the common source of supply are determined by geological conditions, bearing no reference to the boundaries of incorporated political subdivisions or to the location of industrial plants. If the fugitive character of natural gas, and the "co-equal right of all landowners to draw from a common source of supply" is, as stated in Ohio Oil Co. v. Indiana, 177 U. S. 190, 203, the very basis of the power of the legislature to restrain waste, then argument certainly cannot be needed to show that it may not lawfully require some to desist from such "waste" while permitting the same "waste" to others. The two propositions are mutually destructive. Still more glaringly is it violated if permission to "waste" or "wastefully use" from the common store is denied to some and granted to others. Yet this is the precise construction of the law adopted and upheld by the state officials. As construed by the state courts, the act involved in Lindsley v. Natural Carbonic Gas Co., 220 U. S. 61, prohibited only the use of pumps or artificial contrivances to accelerate the natural flow of percolating water, with the object, not to use the water in connection with the enjoyment of the land, but to extract and vend the gas as merchandise, allowing the water to run to waste. So construed, it was sustained by this court (p. 77). Even if the analogy between water and natural gas were complete, the present law is wholly dissimilar. Further as to arbitrary discrimination, see: Connolly v. Union Sewer Pipe Co., 184 U. S. 540; International Har vester Co. v. Missouri, 234 U. S. 199, 215; Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Ry. Co. v. Ellis, 165 U. S. 150; Cotting v. Kansas City Stock Yards Co., 183 U. S. 79; McFarland v. American Sugar Refining Co., 241 U. S. 79; s. c., 229 Fed. Rep. 284; Smith v. Texas, 233 U. S. 630. MR. JUSTICE MCKENNA delivered the opinion of the court. The complainants are corporations of Delaware and have their places of business in that State. The defendants are officers of Wyoming, being respectively, its Attorney General, Prosecuting Officer of Big Horn County, and the Governor of the State. It is alleged that jurisdiction of the District Court depends upon diversity of citizenship, and the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution being violated by an act of the legislature of the State. Chapter 125 of the Session Laws of 1919. The object of the suit is to restrain defendants, and each of them, from enforcing or attempting to enforce the legislation. It is declared by the act, which is attacked, that its purpose is "the protection and conservation of the supply of natural gas." The first section is as follows: "The use, consumption or burning of natural gas taken or drawn from any natural gas well or wells, or borings from which natural gas is produced for the products where such natural gas is burned, consumed or otherwise wasted without the heat therein contained being fully and actually applied and utilized for other manufacturing purposes or domestic purposes is hereby declared to be a wasteful and extravagant use of natural gas and shall be unlawful when such gas well or source of supply is located within ten miles of any incorporated town or industrial plant." Section 2 prohibits the use, sale or other distribution of Opinion of the Court. 254 U. S. natural gas, the product of any well owned, leased or managed by any person, for the purpose of manufacturing or producing carbon or other resultant products from the burning or consumption of such gas, without the heat therein being fully and actually utilized for other manufacturing purposes or domestic purposes. Violations are made misdemeanors. The grounds of contention against the act are set forth in very voluminous pleadings, supplemented by a number of affidavits. But only a brief summary of them is necessary to present the question involved, which is, stated broadly, that the act transcends the police power of the State, its purpose and effect being not to regulate and conserve natural gas, but to prohibit its use, and make a discrimination between owners having equal rights, and thereby violates Article I, § 10, of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment thereof. Prior to the enactment of the statute, the Midland Company had erected a factory for the manufacture of carbon black, which factory is located about 11⁄2 miles from the town of Cowley, Big Horn County, at an expenditure of $375,000. It is equipped for the manufacture of such carbon black, and can be used for no other purpose, and there is produced from it approximately 13,000 pounds of that article daily, which is sufficient for the manufacture of 117,000 pounds of printing ink. From the gas consumed to make the carbon black, there is first extracted approximately 1600 gallons per day of highgravity gasoline. The uses of carbon black are enumerated, and it is alleged that no form of it possessing the same properties and the wide variety of uses can be commercially manufactured from any material or substance other than natural gas. The origin of the industry and the uses of its product are variously detailed, and it is alleged that the company's factory is so conducted as to permit no waste, that the best known processes and appliances are employed, and that the operation of the gasoline absorption plant and the recovery of gasoline from the gas supplied by the wells would be impossible if the carbon plant should cease to be operated, for the reason that the gas cannot be sold to other users in that locality in sufficient quantities to render the extraction of gasoline therefrom commercially profitable. The Occidental Oil and Gas Company owns the land upon which are located the gas wells constituting the principal source of supply to the plant and carbon factory of the Midland Company. The Occidental Oil and Gas Company also constructed, owns and operates the pipe line by which the gas is conveyed to the factory, and delivers it to the factory, receiving from the Eastern Fuel Company, which owns and operates the gasoline extraction plant, a royalty of one-half of the gasoline extracted therefrom. The Oil Company also owns mineral leases covering 1200 acres of proved gas territory within ten miles of Cowley. Its business is an integral and inseparable part of that of the Midland Carbon Company, and all of its investments have been made in view of the carbon business. In the construction of its pipe line it expended $65,000, and in the purchase of lands upon which the wells are located, a sum exceeding $30,000. Other gas lands are alleged to have been purchased and leased prior to the enactment of the law. There are other allegations asserting the use of the gas and its products, and that such use is not a waste of the gas. Various ways in which the law violates complainants' rights under the Constitution of the United States are detailed: that under the guise of regulation the restrictions of the act are so framed as to abolish, ruin and destroy complainants' business, while leaving it open to others to engage in carbon manufacture, without saving the gaso |