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(IBD) Could Monterey Shale Save California? Has 4 times the oil that spawned North Dakota boom

Energy: The former Golden State is floating in debt, even as it sits on two-thirds of America's shale oil reserves locked in a formation four times the size of the one that sparked North Dakota's economic boom.

North Dakota is now the largest oil producer in the country after Texas with a monthly oil output of about 20 million barrels. North Dakota's oil boom accounts for 11% of U.S. oil production, and it is the impetus behind the state's $3.8 billion surplus and an unemployment rate of just 3.2%, the lowest in the nation.

California is not running a surplus, but it is sitting on a lot more oil than is contained in the Bakken shale formation North Dakota straddles. Covering 1,750 square miles from southern to central California, the Monterey shale formation has untapped deposits estimated at 15.4 billion barrels, according to the United States Energy Information Administration.

Until recently, the complex geology of the formation has made exploration and extraction prohibitively expensive.

But as with oil from the Bakken shale in North Dakota and natural gas extracted from the Marcellus formation in the Northeast, technological advances have unleashed a bounty of riches, pushing proven reserves upward and smashing the myth of peak oil.

The key technology behind the boom is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which fluids are injected into the porous rock under high pressure to fracture the rock and release the oil or natural gas, which can then be pumped to the surface.

Combined with horizontal drilling, great stores of energy can be released with a minimal footprint.

Extracting oil from the Monterey shale will require companies to engage in more intensive fracking and deeper, horizontal drilling, which has caused groups in environmentally sensitive California to warn of poisoned groundwater and the latest fantasy, the spawning of earthquakes.

Tags: Bakken, California, Marcellus, NorthDakota, OBAMA, OPEC, Obama, Sobieski, energy, fracking, More…obama, oil, shale

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Comment by horsesrunningplains on February 6, 2013 at 2:04pm: Don't believe bama would allow- not enough windmill and green technology there for handout and bankruptcy tliberal progressive idiots would bite off nose to spite their faces-they don't care about America- they believe in an ideology which has been proved not to work--shows what idiots they really are--let's see the liberal progressives do have Socialist Party members among them--guess what theology they might be dispursing in their elitists selves.

Comment by Debrajoe Smith-Beatty on February 6, 2013 at 9:42am: I am the captain of my my life’s voyage. I navigate my ship. I sail the direction

that I chose. Experiencing all that I can on this voyage is my course. Exploring the un-

known by reaching deep into myself and discovering my utopia. I will not permit the ever

changing gales of wind blown out of Obama’s mouth rock my life’s ship. I will not

succumb to the conflict that Obama spreads. I will not involve myself in the crisis

situations that Obama’s has carefully crafted for the un-suspecting citizens. I have more

important issues to absorb myself.

Comment by Gerald Smith on February 6, 2013 at 9:40am: I would bet my meager, heavily taxed paycheck that there is no way the environmental whackos of which Governor Moonbeam is one, are going to allow fracking in California. Makes way too much sense and as we all know, liberals/socialists/marxists have no common sense.

Comment by Gerald Smith on February 6, 2013 at 9:37am: There is strong suspicion that Agenda 21 and Obama's well-known dislilke for the suburbs are behind the attempts to shut downSan Joaquin farming. The intent is to curb farming, in particular livestock farming, and to drive us back to the cities so they cand pack us in like gerbils. This will: (1) stop humans ffrom ravaging mother earth, (2) make more American wealth available for the s***holes of the world, and (3) bring an influx of tax money into the cities so the liberals can piss it away on useless social programs. Ovomit is convinced that whites fled to the burbs and left the blacks behind to live in poverty which is the reason for all the urban ills. (Apparently there are no blacks or other minorities living in the suburbs.) For Ovomit and for the UN this is payback time.

Comment by Debrajoe Smith-Beatty on February 6, 2013 at 7:34am: Obama will just give it away. He doesn't think Americans deserve anything while his so called wife lives high on the hog.

Comment by mike on February 6, 2013 at 6:39am: The more money these libs get their hands on the more ways they will find to spend it.

Comment by John W. Holden on February 6, 2013 at 2:22am: Nothing can save California, the idiots running that state will just slap a sticker on it that says this shale oil is known to cause cancer in California don't you know, ever thing in California causes cancer, and from the way they keep electing the douche bags in the left wing liberal democratic party, I think it must be brain cancer.

Comment by Gil Payne on February 6, 2013 at 12:46am: With Governor Brown at the helm and the Democrats,' Greenies" in Sacramento, no chance of going after the shale oil.

Comment by Lawrence Bates on February 6, 2013 at 12:30am: The answer to the question is a resounding "Not if Obuslim can help it"!

Comment by Kenneth M. Fisher on February 6, 2013 at 12:04am: You are dreaming. Do you actually think Moonbeam and his fellow Demoncrats who now control Taxifornia would even consider it? They have brains in North Dakota!

God bless, yours in Their Hearts,

Kenneth M. Fisher, Founding Director

Concerned Roman Catholics of America, Inc.