A Glimpse of Fracking the Monterey Formation, California

The Monterey Formation in central California, running from the Bay Area down to Santa Barbara, inland to the start of the Sierras (map below), contains as much oil as Saudi Arabia did, without all the problems of working with Arabs.

It's a domestic site, and requires fracking to get it out since most of the oil is in shale. To frack, you drill a well, inject a million gallons of water for each well, and some chemicals and sand. The effect is limited to around 150 meters from the bore hole, so a honeycomb grid of wells every 300 meters is necessary, though directional drilling probably works best and will run dozens of holes out of one borehole. Maybe. That's a LOT of drilling and a lot of water. We're talking millions of wells for that large area. It's years of work. Significant lakes worth of water. And all of it here in California, safely away from the Muslim terrorists. We can tell them "thank you, no" to further oil sales and work with what we've got in our own borders.

The payoff from fracking is a fantastic reason to get cheap desalination, and a really potent political action committee going after the water needed. Downside? The US Federal Govt won't be letting California gain independence with this still being untapped. The gold they might ignore, but not this. Oil is too valuable. Upside is cheap solar will happen because there's finally an industrial reason to have it. All those water pumps. Same with cheap desalination. It will be necessary to get the water for the fracking, and all the pipelines and pumps, well, when this is over in about a century, there will be a lot of scrap materials for other use available.

With so many oil wells, there's going to be jobs for geologists and drillers and petroleum engineers, but they'll be moving site every year or so for each group of wellheads. I expect trailers are the easiest, that or RVs. Some sections are flat and hot. Some are mountainous near the coast. All will involve many drilling rigs being setup, used, put away, and a massive number of pipes to catch the natural gas and the oil, for use, and probably re-use the water at the next well. The formation is up to 1900 feet thick, which means there could be a LOT of oil to recover there. The current estimate is just under 16 billion barrels of oil. That's not a small number.

So say they figure out the water and get the pipes and spill basins setup and capture the natural gas to funnel off to our underground storage near South Sacramento (no really, that's a real thing). Say that this whole thing works and makes enough money and produces sufficient oil to keep our cars on the road, at a higher price. What is the impact on Peak Oil preparations? We'll have fuel for jobs, those still working domestically anyway. We'll have jobs building the wellhead sites, running them for years for the last drops of oil, and making them pretty while that finishes, and more jobs decommissioning them after it's done.

Who is an enemy of this?

1. The Arabs. They'd attack it just to keep eating. They trade oil for food because they don't grow their own. 
2. The environmentalists, Earth First! and ELF in particular would attack it to create a catastrophic spill and blame the oil industry, despite actually destroying the environment in the process. 
3. The fishermen (anglers) would be against it, since the rivers would drop and hold less fish. 
4. Agriculture would be against it. That's their water supply. 
5. LA would be against it, because it would be using the water they were planning to wash their driveways with. 

BTW, it was a picture like this on the evening news in San Francisco, during the early 1980's drought that forced us (in the North) to put bricks in our toilets which got the Divide California movement some traction. Those of us from the North remember it and remain angry. That is our water washing off their driveway to make it pretty.

Water is a very big deal in California, and the place most of the oil resides is quite short of fresh water. What goes into the ground must be fresh water, too, not salt. Eventually that aqueduct will leak out into someone's well or get into the rivers and the cost of poisoning a river, and all the land downstream, with salt? Trillions in fines and lawsuits is just the start. So, it has to be fresh water. And the wiki isn't clear as to what chemicals are put into water to make it frack better than just water itself.

California is about Agriculture and Tourism, with retirees just being a kind of tourist that stays longer, perhaps think of them as a crop that pays you to care for them. Nice weather in the rest of the state, but crappy down by Bakersfield, complete with heavy pollution. It rains about 1-3 inches a year there. Its a desert, slightly drier than most of the Mohave Desert, actually. If it wasn't for the reservoirs capturing rainfall in the Sierras and carefully feeding it into the irrigation systems by gravity, there'd be nobody living there.

So the biggest challenge of the Monterey Formation Fracking project, and all that oil, is getting the water to extract it. I suspect this will happen the way I've described: cheap desalination and cheap solar to pump it. However, there's another way, just a LOT slower.

• You can empty LA and use all their water for the wells. LA won't like that. 
• Or you can crank up the water pumps near Tracy and run the aqueduct system at maximum, killing all the fish in the delta and draining the SF bay into the system. 
• Or you can use salt water when fresh water isn't available and bribe the govt to overlook the poisoning of aquifers in California with Salt Water. 
• Or you can build the Grand Canal from the Columbia River down through Oregon, Nevada, and finally the Owens River before diverting it through Tehachapi Pass into the San Joaquin Valley and provide the fresh water for the wells. That's the larger water supply, but it will lose a lot on the way. Or it will after the rights revert, year by year, to allow real estate deals along the canals in the Oregon and Nevada High Desert. Not ideal, but it could happen. 

These are not ideal solutions, but they are solutions. Grand civil engineering projects, like extracting a Saudia Arabia of oil from California without causing the greatest man-made publicized ecological catastrophe in history... well, them's is the cards. What do you think?