While touting his ostensible “all of the above” energy plan and working the campaign trail not so very long ago, President Obama would justify his many expensive green-energy plans by repeatedly saying something along the lines of, “America consumes 20 percent of the world’s oil, but only has two percent of its reserves” — which is about as bogus a statistic as it gets. America only having two percent of the world’s oil relies on measures of its proven reserves, i.e., the amount of oil that has both been discovered and is technologically and economically feasible to extract, remaining static.
New technology means that oil deposits the world over are suddenly a lot more available for cost-effective human productivity, and while certain states have taken advantage of the effectively growing oil-and-gas abundance — North Dakota has been raking it in by tapping into the Bakken shale formation — California is sittin’ pretty atop a formation four times the size of that one. The NYT reports:
These wells are tapping crude directly from what is called the Monterey Shale, which could represent the future of California’s oil industry — and a potential arena for conflict between drillers and the state’s powerful environmental interests. …
Comprising two-thirds of the United States’s total estimated shale oil reserves and covering 1,750 square miles from Southern to Central California, the Monterey Shale could turn California into the nation’s top oil-producing state and yield the kind of riches that far smaller shale oil deposits have showered on North Dakota and Texas.
For decades, oilmen have been unable to extricate the Monterey Shale’s crude because of its complex geological formation, which makes extraction quite expensive. But as the oil industry’s technological advances succeed in unlocking oil from increasingly difficult locations...
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
