The federal administration in charge of energy has dramatically cut its estimated reserves of recoverable oil in California by 96 percent to 600 million barrels, according to media reports. The new estimate comes after our recent report, Nervous Energy, in the April issue of Sunset magazine, which looked at the potential impact of future fracking on farming in California.
“Not all reserves are created equal,” Energy Information Administrator Adam Sieminski told reporters at the Financial Times and Energy Intelligence Oil & Gas Summit in New York, Bloomberg reported. “It just turned out it’s harder to frack that reserve and get it out of the ground.”
Fracking uses a proprietary mixture of chemicals, water, and sand pumped underground to break up rocks and release pockets of oil. The Monterey Shale in California was estimated to be the largest shale oil reserve in the U.S. and had touched off a groundswell of fracking opposition in California. But the reports say that the EIA believes that oil will be harder to extract than previously thought.
“From the information we’ve been able to gather, we’ve not seen evidence that oil extraction in this area is very productive using techniques like fracking,” said John Staub, a petroleum exploration and production analyst who led the energy agency’s research, in a story published by the Los Angeles Times.
The news comes a day after Santa Cruz became the first county to ban fracking in California. Environmental groups have urged Governor Jerry Brown to ban the practice, but while he has supported stricter regulation, he has spoken in favor of the technology.
You can read our report Nervous Energy in Sunset, or here on our website.