S. W. Tromp was a Dutch scientist who, alongside J. H. Menten and De Greve, belonged to the first generation of geologists to study the natural oil wells of the East Indies in the aftermath of the 1859 Pennsylvania oil boom. Van Bemmelen names Tromp and Menten together — “J. H. MENTEN and S. W. TROMP; DE GREVE, 1865” — as the scientists who, in the early 1860s, “started to study the geological features of the known natural oil wells in the East Indies”, thus inaugurating the scientific literature on East Indian petroleum.
Place in the East-Indian petroleum literature
Tromp’s work, together with that of Menten and De Greve, stands at the head of the documentary sequence of East-Indian petroleum geology. For the full sequence see the entry on J. H. Menten. Tromp’s contribution is, accordingly, part of the foundational scientific literature on which the subsequent northern-Sumatran oil industry — including the East Atjeh, Tamiang and Atjeh complex fields on Atjeh territory — was built.
Significance for Atjeh
Tromp’s significance for the encyclopedia of Acheh history is indirect: he is one of the founders of East-Indian petroleum geology, and his early scientific work accordingly belongs to the documentary background against which the 1883–1885 founding of the northern-Sumatran oil industry — and its subsequent extension onto Atjeh territory — was undertaken.
See Also
- Acheh
- De Greve
- East Atjeh oil block
- J. H. Menten
- J. Zulkler
- Oil exploration in North Sumatra
- Ph. C. Fennema
- Telaga Said
- Van Bemmelen’s The Geology of Indonesia (1949)
- 1859
- 1865
Source
The Geology of Indonesia, by R. W. van Bemmelen, Vol. II: Economic Geology (The Hague: Government Printing Office; Martinus Nijhoff, 1949), p. 7 (petroleum history).