The fossil fuel industry has been pulling your leg – shale oil is not a panacea. The shale oil boom will become a bust in North Dakota and Texas in less than a decade. And now it appears that the great California shale oil boom is a bust before it even got started.
The great imaginary California oil boom: Over before it started,
California has been abuzz for the past couple of years about the prospect of vast new oil wealth supposedly ready for the taking in the Monterey Shale thousands of feet below the state. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) hadpreviously estimated that 15.4 billion barrels were technically recoverable, basing the number on a report from a contractor who relied heavily on oil industry presentations rather than independent data.
The California economy was supposed to benefit from 2.8 million new jobs by 2020. The state was also supposed to gain $220 billion in additional income and $24 billion in additional tax revenues in that year alone, according to a study from the University of Southern California that relied heavily on industry funding.
But that was before the revelation by the Times that the EIA will reduce its estimate of technically recoverable oil in California’s Monterey Shale by 96 percent–almost a complete wipeout–after taking a close look at actual data for wells drilled there already. The agency now believes that only about 600 million barrels are recoverable using existing technology. The 600 million barrels still sound like a lot, but those barrels would last the United States all of 40 days at the current rate of consumption.
In addition recovering shale oil requires a lot of water which thanks to global climate change California is in short supply. Would you really prefer to have oil rather than lettuce and strawberries? In addition how wise it to be pumping million of gallons of water into the ground in an already earthquake susceptible area, just look at Oklahoma.
We may not like it but fossil fuel is not our future. The sooner we recognize this the better chance we have of saving our civilization and species.