I live in CA. The Monterey Shale located along the western edge of the Central Valley is FOUR TIMES THE SIZE OF THE MIGHTY BAKKEN. The State is broke. Will libs in places like San Francisco allow fracking? Even though we’re broke and rapidly turning into a third world country? No!!! Couldn’t have that. We’re all gonna make a living serving crab salad to tourists from Texas. That seems to be the plan.
Although there certainly all political roadblocks, the Monterey Shale has technical difficulties as well.
“Based on our drilling results, our view is that the oil has migrated out of the formation and is now found in pockets outside of the Monterey shale,” said Kurt Glaubitz, a spokesman for San Ramo
None of the companies that have tried it so far have had significant success, and it doesn’t appear to be widespread,”Marshall said by e-mail. “It may take an advancement in technology or methodology to unlock the oil production potential of the formation.”
The Monterey shale is more expensive to explore than the Bakken shale that’s yielded an oil boom in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford shale in Texas, said Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis.
“The Eagle Ford is like a pound cake,” Jaffe said in a telephone interview. “The Monterey shale is like a nine-layer chocolate cake and to get all the layers straightened up and put in all the frosting every place we wanted — that’s going to be more complicated and it takes more skill.”
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http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2012/11nov/monterey1112.cfm
California petroleum geologists know the Monterey Shale as a prolific source rock for many of the state’s large oil fields. Clarke said interest in tapping the Monterey comes in cycles, the latest peak occurring about 20 years ago.
When the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing began to unlock shale production in other parts of the country, the Monterey Shale started getting a closer look.
Unlike some shales, the Monterey Shale doesn’t present a highly consistent picture. Instead, “it changes dramatically wherever it is in California,” Clarke said.
He said it’s important to identify where the Monterey is dolomitic or siliceous and brittle – and therefore theoretically more responsive to stimulative hydrofracturing – and where it is more calcereous and ductile.
In the Southern California/L.A. Basin area, “there is a lot of stuff unknown,” he said. “The other thing is that there has been 2-D seismic in the L.A. Basin but no 3-D seismic, except for what we’ve done in the Long Beach area.”
Several companies are looking at the Monterey Shale as a resource play, taking various approaches to the problem, but no one has been able to characterize the Monterey’s geology and develop a fully successful approach to tapping its potential.