Post Carbon Fellow David Hughes report Drilling California: A Reality Check on the Monterey Shale was quoted in this feature on prospects for the Monterey shale at Sunset Magazine.

From the article:

The report came out as fracking, ramping up nationwide, triggered North Dakota’s current oil boom and Pennsylvania’s natural gas rush. But drilling horizontally across the Monterey might prove trickier, because its rock strata have been jumbled over the eons by seismic activity. “On the East Coast, if we look at the geology, it’s akin to a layer cake,” says Jayni Foley Hein, executive director of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “In the Monterey Shale, it’s more akin to a marble cake.”

For all the logistical challenges, the sheer amount of anticipated oil makes the Monterey too tempting for the energy industry to leave alone. “I think you could see, if the technological barriers are overcome, a significant replacement of imported oil with domestically produced oil,” says Tupper Hull, vice president of the Western States Petroleum Association. A University of Southern California study, funded by Hull’s organization, projected that, if EIA’s estimates are correct, drilling could create 2.8 million jobs in California and bring in $24.6 billion in state and local taxes during the peak year of 2020.

But the government’s projection has been disputed. In December, two organizations critical of fracking—the Post Carbon Institute and the Physicians Scientists & Engineers for Healthy Energy—released an analysis by veteran Canadian geoscientist J. David Hughes that concluded the EIA numbers are significantly overstated. That cast doubt on the rosy jobs forecast in the USC study. Other industry-friendly studies have predicted smaller job gains too.

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