...”it takes 127,000 gallons of water to frack a well...”
No. It takes between 3 and 11 million gallons of water to frack a well. In the Eagleford the average is 8 million gal and in the Marcellus it’s 3.5 million.
Then the blowback and produced water gives back 40-60% of that volume that requires treatment/recycling or disposal (by deep well injection).
Water in shale oil is a huge economy: about $37,888,000,000 to supply and treat/dispose in 2014, and growing about 6% annually. More than 80% of the cost is for hauling and disposal.
I can’t see California handling all the tanker traffic and media hype.
And I bet there’s more oil in California that we can imagine.
It's revealing that even that miniscule amount of water was consider too much to the author of this article. Even when converted into a "less than a family of four uses in a year" concept, it was still too much.
Off the coast of Southern California there were oil rigs that are now mostly shut down.(A few are left but they won’t allow new ones to be built) People say the oil just seeps up from the ocean bottoms and forms tar balls on some of the beaches. California won’t allow any more off shore drilling but there’s tons of oil there if they wanted to get it!