Working For Jobs

Last summer, clean-air activists celebrated the shutdown of Chicago’s notorious Fisk and Crawford coal power plants, which ended the Windy City’s distinction as the only U.S. metropolis to house two operating coal facilities. The victory came thanks to a dogged grassroots battle waged by residents of Little Village and Pilsen, the predominantly Latino, working-class neighborhoods bearing the brunt of the plants’ pollution. Today, the woman who spearheaded that battle, lifelong Little Village resident Kimberly Wasserman, becomes North America’s recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, one of the highest honors in the world for grassroots green activism.

Wasserman was 21 when her infant son suffered his first asthma attack. She had just started working for the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), doing door-to-door surveys gauging neighbors’ environmental concerns, so she started asking around about asthma and respiratory issues, which turned out to be common problems in the community. Soon after, a Harvard School of Public Health study confirmed LVEJO’s suspicions that the coal plants might have something to do with the high rates of asthma in the neighborhood, and Wasserman started organizing.

We got a chance to talk with Wasserman about what it took to kick Big Coal to the curb.

Q. Tell me about what motivated you to take on this issue. How long had you lived in Little Village, and how aware were you of environmental health issues before?

A. I was born and raised in Little Village. I’ve lived here 32 out of the 36 years that I’ve been on this lovely planet. I didn’t know a whole lot about air quality or environmental issues before entering this job [at LVEJO]. [When] my baby was about two months old, he had his first asthma attack. I started focusing my door-to-door conversations to try to understand how many other people had family members with respiratory issues. We found that an alarming number of people in our neighborhood had asthma. So we started to look at, what is in our neighborhood? We found the coal power plants. A lot of folks didn’t know what they did there; the smoke was white and very unassuming, and so a lot of young people called it the cloud factory because they thought that’s where clouds came from.

It made us want to understand, well, how do you burn coal? The more we researched, we were surprised that our local government would allow such dirty and outdated technology. In 2000, Harvard School of Public Health released a study about coal power plants in Illinois, and the information about the Crawford and Fisk plant[s] was very astounding. There were over 3,000 asthma attacks, 1,500 emergency room visits, and 41 deaths a year attributed to these coal power plants. And then on top of that, we found out the coal power plant didn’t supply electricity to the city of Chicago or the state of Illinois.

Q. How did you share what you’d found out with the neighborhood and organize people to fight for change?

A. We shared this door-to-door. We had block meetings in which we would talk about what is asthma and how do you develop it and what are some of the contributing factors. [People aren’t] just dealing with a child or an adult or a senior with illness, they’re also having to miss work, people are missing school, and all those [things] have an impact on the community. People were upset when they found out that the city wasn’t willing to do anything about it. Why is it that our community is being sacrificed for the sake of making money for this industry? It was on us to make sure that we funneled that anger and resentment in a positive way.

At first we sent a letter to city hall and requested a meeting, and nobody wanted to talk to us. Our young people wanted to show what this meant in real life. So they did an action on the fifth floor of city hall, in front of former Mayor Daley’s office. Forty-one young people laid on the floor and zipped themselves up in body bags and put inhalers in their mouths. We got a phone call from the mayor’s media office that basically yelled at me and said, you embarrassed the mayor, this is not appropriate. And our response was, well, this coal power plant in our neighborhood is not appropriate. So we knew that we struck a chord.

Q. How did the culture and sense of community in Little Village contribute to your campaign?

A. A lot of what helped us was looking at the history of where our people come from. Taking the lessons we learned from both Mexican and Mexican-American history, and looking at movement building and murals and art and street theater, and how all of those things played into communication of a struggle and a solution — we tried to incorporate posters and art and murals. We did street theater; we held clean-power elections where we would have folks on one corner with wind and solar power, and on the other corner we had coal barons dressed to the nines in tuxedos. It helped us educate people in nontraditional ways, but ways that have been shown in our history and culture to be very effective.

Q. What was the turning point that led to your eventual success?

A. In creation of the [clean power coalition, a partnership with big green groups], we were able to leverage a lot of resources that organizations like ours don’t have. Greenpeace scaled the smokestack in Pilsen and camped there for two days, which is amazing because our community members are like, I can’t afford to get arrested, I have no papers.

The second thing was that Mayor Daley announced that he was retiring and would not be seeking reelection. The opportunity to make this part of the election campaign was instrumental. Every time there was a debate or an interview, we tried our best to get this issue included in that conversation. So when Rahm Emanuel won, we were able to hold him to his promise of saying if I win, I’m going to deal with the issue. A year into office he was like, all right, you guys have garnered enough support. He let [the coal plants] know what was happening and gave them 90 days [to either comply with required upgrades and lower their emissions or shut down]. Ninety days later they came back and said we’re going to voluntarily shut down.

Q. Mainstream green groups like the Sierra Club often get criticized for not working well with grassroots organizations. Why do you think that is? What was your experience building the clean power coalition?

A. Unfortunately I think a lot of it has to do with money and power. [Environmental justice] organizations get less than 5 percent of environmental funding out there. There has to be pushback on that, but there also has to be a conversation. When we came together as a coalition, one of the first things we did was have a conversation on power, on race, on class. It’s the communities of color that are being impacted [by climate change and pollution]. We created a memorandum of understanding to make sure that we as smaller organizations weren’t thrown under the bus, that we weren’t excluded from negotiations.

Luckily, both the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club and the local Greenpeace office were willing to [agree]. I think the staff they have are young people who understand the privilege they come from and are willing to humble themselves enough to have these difficult conversations and find authentic ways to work together. That’s the reality of doing this work — you have to have these uncomfortable conversations.

Q. What are you tackling next, now that the coal plants have been shut down?

A. We have brownfield legacies in our community, and we don’t want another one. We don’t want to be looking at an abandoned coal power plant for the next 20 years. So we’re looking at the remediation and redevelopment of that.

While we were struggling to shut down the coal power plant for 12 years, we were also advocating for a new park to be built in our community. We won that victory as well last year. We’ve been working with the community to develop a design for the park, and make sure that adequate funding is given to this park, being that it’s going to be the first one built in our neighborhood in over 75 years.

And then the last thing that we’re working on is our public transit campaign. We find ourselves in a public-transit desert in our neighborhood. You have to go about a mile north to get the train; it used to go three miles south before you could find a bus. Last year, we won the installation of a new bus line in our neighborhood, so now we have a bus smack-dab in the middle of that three-mile gap. They only gave us a third of the full route we wanted, so we’re going to be advocating for the rest of the route until we get it.

Q. What’s your advice for other communities facing similar battles?

A. Definitely don’t give up. And definitely arm yourself with as much research as possible. There is tons of capacity in our communities to do research, to do surveys, to collect and analyze data. We have to be arming our young people to be thinking about careers in math and science and engineering to be able to bring those skills back and help us tackle some of these environmental-justice issues. When our campaign started, some of our young people were in first or second grade, and those young people are now in college, getting their masters in environmental justice, because this had such a resonating effect on them.

—

Watch a video about Wasserman below, and read more about this year’s other Goldman winners here.

Filed under: Article, Cities, Climate & Energy, Living

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Hey, remember how God made a farmer?  This week it’s time to pay some respect to the folks who actually do most of that farming work.

The vast majority of our stateside fruits and vegetables are handpicked by more than 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Without those farmworkers, we’d be very hungry. But as a whole those workers are treated like hell: They’re underpaid, underinsured, and undereducated. About half of them are undocumented, and only about a third are U.S. citizens. These workers bear the brunt of our food system with their bodies, but only California requires that they get water and bathroom breaks. On average, one farmworker dies on the job every day in the U.S., and laborers can be as young as 12 — legally.

Data from reports by the National Center for Farmworker Health, Center for Progressive Reform, and the Kresge Foundation.

Filed under: Food

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The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California, specifically the Monterey Shale in southern California (see map). Will California become the next North Dakota? Let us ponder.

Oil in California is nothing new — it’s the third highest oil-producing state in the U.S. (after Texas and North Dakota, which recently displaced Alaska for the No. 2 spot). The Monterey area has been drilled for years, profitably, though production has been steadily declining since its peak in the mid ’80s.

However, as you’ve no doubt read in recent breathless media accounts, drilling technology has advanced. Two techniques have been combined: hydro-fracturing, whereby fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) are injected into drill holes to break open tight rock formations, allowing liquid fuels to seep out; and horizontal drilling, whereby drills can travel laterally from drill sites, sometimes miles, allowing a single drill site to cover vastly more area. This is the “fracking” you’ve heard so much about. It puts all kinds of previously inaccessible fossil fuels within reach, albeit expensively. (Oil seems stuck near $100 a barrel, though; with prices that high, all kinds of crazy schemes are economic.)

The Monterey Shale hasn’t been fracked much, at least not with horizontal drilling, but oil companies have got their beady little eyes on it. The typical news report, like this one in The New York Times, pegs the oil resource in the Monterey Shale at just over 15 billion barrels of oil, more than four times the tight oil in the storied Bakken Shale in North Dakota and more than two-thirds of all the tight oil in the country.

(Vocab note: “shale oil” or “tight oil” refers to oil stuck in shale rock formations; “oil shale,” a kind of rock containing kerogen, which can be refined into oil, is a whole different thing — a grosser, even less economic thing.)

A new study from University of Southern California says that fracking all that tight oil could boost the state’s economy by 14 percent. Even for a purportedly green state, that’s a tough offer to refuse. Sure enough, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been making positive noises about it, saying he’s open to it as long as there are proper regulations.

National enviro groups have not put up much resistance so far. They’re busy with Keystone or EPA or the like. But local protestors could use some help. This seems to me like one to fight. Here, in no particular order, are 10 reasons why.

1. This isn’t natural gas we’re talking about, which can displace coal and reduce carbon emissions. This is oil. And it’s heavy, carbon-intensive oil. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) studies the characteristics of each source of oil — extraction and transportation — and assigns it a score, the higher being worse for the climate. California oil scores badly:

Most oil sources worldwide have scores between 5 and 13, under the system used by California Air Resources Board.

[California's] Midway-Sunset oil scores 21.18. Crude from nearby Coalinga scores 25.36. The San Ardo field, whose bobbing pump jacks push up against Highway 101 between King City and San Luis Obispo, scores 28.82.

And the [Canadian] tar sands?

One synthetic oil from the tar sands — Albian Heavy Synthetic — scores 21.02. Another, Suncor Synthetic A, rates 24.49. Syncrude Sweet comes in at 21.87.

California’s oil is as dirty as Canadian tar sands! And with fracking comes increased energy intensity and hundreds more wells. So yeah, this stuff is unambiguously bad from a climate perspective. Depending on how much of that 15 billion barrels gets dug up and burned, it will mean billions and billions of tons of new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe even as much as will be piped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

2. Speaking of the oil being dirty: California recently implemented a “low-carbon fuel standard” requiring producers to decrease the carbon intensity of the fuels they sell in the state. The dirty sludge pulled out of the Monterey Shale is almost certainly not going to meet that standard. That means it can’t be burned in-state. They’ll have to export it.

So California gets the damage to land, air, and water, oil companies get the profit, and other states get the oil. Sweet deal!

3. That 15 billion barrels of oil in Monterey? It is, to put it charitably, speculative.

My editor is convinced that a full discussion of this point is unbearably boring and will drive away this post’s few readers. So I’ve moved the full discussion down to the bottom. Here’s the takeaway:

The amount of technically recoverable oil is determined by multiplying the total amount of oil that USGS estimates is under the Monterey Shale by the “recovery factor,” which is the percentage of the oil that can be recovered with today’s technology. The USGS estimate is based on mathematical models, not data, and is extremely speculative. The recovery factor that’s being used for Monterey is probably optimistic — it’s more than double that of other tight oil plays like the Bakken Shale. Long story short, 15 billion barrels is probably a) wrong and b) high.

For a full discussion of this fascinating matter, scroll down to the bottom of the post.

(I should pause here to say that most of what I know on these subjects I learned from energy analyst Chris Nelder, whose work you should be reading religiously. To better understand unconventional fuels like tight oil, start here and here.)

4. Colorado and North Dakota have fairly “flat beds,” i.e., stacked horizontal layers of rock. California has a messy bed (I owe the analogy to RL Miller), which is to say its layers have been cranked, tossed, folded, and otherwise mangled by frequent earthquakes. California is, you’ll recall, full of fault lines.

That may help explain why, despite the optimistic numbers above, the Monterey Shale has thus far proved something of a disappointment. A story in World Oil (paywalled) notes that disappointing results from Monterey have forced operators to “revisit their geological drawing boards.” The Energy Information Administration estimated that Monterey would produce 550 million barrels per well, but “operators today are reporting typical flowrates averaging only around 350 to 400″ barrels per day. At 400 barrels a day, it would take a well 3,767 years to hit 550 million barrels. Perhaps the EIA was a bit optimistic?

This is from an AP report last year:

… drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. [Alliance Bernstein analyst Bob] Brackett suggests that there are a few characteristics of the geology that could make the field more difficult to develop. There are lots of natural faults in the rock, which means drillers can’t easily control the flow of oil through faults they create. Also, the rock is not under enormous pressure, so there is less force pushing the oil to the surface. And the oil may be relatively thick and sticky, which slows its flow.

If the Monterey had performed as well as the Bakken field in North Dakota or the Eagle Ford in Texas, it would be delivering an additional 300,000 barrels of oil per day by now, Brackett says. Instead, production in California is flat.

“We don’t expect a ‘Bakken Boom’ to strike the San Joaquin Valley,” Brackett wrote. “We expect California production to grow only modestly.”

A story in the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was blunt in reaction to the EIA’s optimistic numbers: “Sounds good, until you realize there is no truly successful Monterey resource play to date.”

The promise of fracking in California is based on hope, not data. The danger is a debt-driven explosion of wells (and the chemicals they bring), followed by a bust as production proves disappointing.

5. Water is always a problem in California, a state that lurches from drought to drought and suffers constant bickering between cities, farmers, fishers, and everyone else over the dwindling resource. According to industry figures [PDF], every fracking well uses between 80,000 and 300,000 gallons of water. (That probably means they use way more than that in reality.)

In addition, as Food & Water Watch says in this informative issue brief, “Increasing demand for fresh water, leaking toxic waste pits, well-cementing failures and injection of chemicals underground all post serious short- and long-term water risk.”

Is this how Californians want to use their dwindling water? To expedite the export of dirty oil?

6. Speaking of water, fracking produces a shit-ton of wastewater. It can’t be disposed of in rivers or on the ground (though it very often leaks, accidentally, into both), so instead it’s typically injected far underground, creating the risk of “induced seismicity,” i.e., earthquakes. The link between injection and seismicity in areas with known faults is pretty well-documented at this point. Here’s a paper on it [PDF] in the journal of the American Geophysical Union. There’s also a great article about it in the latest issue of Mother Jones; it isn’t officially online yet, but it looks like you can get a bootleg copy here.

Less is known about injecting into areas with unknown faults, which are all over California. As far as I can tell, there’s been no research at all on deep injection in California specifically. The Mother Jones piece makes pretty clear that the industry is trying to squelch any discussion of this, but don’t worry, they pledge to “avoid known faults.” What could go wrong? (The 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 50 people, originated in an unknown fault. Just saying.)

7. Most people don’t get this, but getting at tight oil requires a lot of wells, because production at each well falls off pretty quickly. There’s not much data from Monterey yet, because there aren’t a lot of horizontal fracking wells yet, but data from other tight oil plays shows that the depletion rate is high, on the order of 80 or 90 percent the first year. Here’s the production profile of a typical well in the Bakken play:

Other tight oil plays have turned up similar results.

Oil companies are not particularly eager for people to know this. When petroleum geologist and researcher Arthur Berman looked at actual well data, it turned out oil and gas companies had systematically overstated shale well productivity:

With wells falling off quickly, and most early fracking funded by debt, producers are under huge pressure to keep digging new wells. Here’s what that looks like, in a graph put together by French petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, taken from yet another Nelder post:

(For reference: kb/d is thousands of barrels per day; b/d/w is barrels per day per well.)

Nelder writes of this graph:

It tells the real story of tight oil production beautifully. Each well produces a mere 150 barrels or so per day on average, and like shale gas wells, their output declines rapidly after initial production. As [Foreign Policy's Steve] LeVine learned from a Bakken executive, the decline rate can be over 90 percent in the first year, then gradually tapers off. After seven or eight years, wells will have produced over 60 percent of their recoverable reserves. Therefore, you have to keep drilling like hell just to maintain production, and drill even more to increase it. … But at around $7 million per well, these wells are not cheap.

Given the steep decline rates of typical fracking wells, making the thick, hard-to-reach Monterey Shale oil pay off like oil companies want it to pay off — like they’re promising California officials it will pay off — means constantly drilling a swarm of new wells.

Meanwhile, four of California’s top 10 agricultural counties are in frack-targeted areas, which is why agricultural groups are starting to ally with greens against it. Then there are the threatened wells in the Baldwin Hills oil field near Culver City, where oil drilling has already had devastating effects on (largely poor) residents. The local impacts from these wells are no joke, and there are going to be a lot of them.

8. Can Californians trust their government to properly regulate fracking? (That’s what a lot of the borderline somnolent green groups seem to think.) The fracking that has gone on in the state so far seem to have flown completely under the radar of state regulators. Get this, from the L.A. Times:

This new interest in fracking plainly caught California regulators off guard. In January 2011, [state Sen. Fran] Pavley wrote to the state division of oil, gas and geothermal resources, or DOGGR (pronounced “dogger”), asking for information [PDF] about the number and location of fracked wells in the state, the amount of water employed, the permitting process and what was known about the risk to groundwater.

The agency responded with a detailed four-page letter, the gist of which was: “We don’t know nothin’.” Its actual words were: “The Division is unable to identify where and how often hydraulic fracturing occurs within the state.” It also said that “the Division has not yet developed regulations to address this activity.”

So, DOGGR doesn’t know where the fracking is, or how much there is, and it hasn’t bothered to develop any regulations to address it. But now, the agency insists it’s changing. It’s on top of things. This DOGGR. So … yeah. No worries, Californians. You’re in good hands!

9. That USC study about the economic effects of fracking I mentioned up top? DeSmogBlog did a little sniffing around and found oily fingerprints all over it. It was funded by, written by, and reviewed by people with longstanding ties to the industry. California officials might do well to take it with several grains of salt.

10. It is morally wrong to sacrifice the interests of poor people and future generations for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and shareholders. Kinda seems like this one should go without saying, but …

I guess that’s enough for now. If activists rally against California oil fracking, they’ll get the same lectures from VSPs that the Keystone campaign gets: “This one bit of supply won’t make any difference to climate change; as long as demand exists, they’ll get it out somehow; you’re distracting from the carbon tax pony.” But whatever. It’s time for states and oil producers to get the message that moving heaven and earth to reach the world’s filthiest fossil fuels is no longer socially acceptable.

Every junkie needs an intervention.

——
* So, as promised, for you hardcore nerds, more on why the 15 billion number is almost certainly wrong, and most likely high:

Here’s a handy chart that I’m going to steal from this piece in Oil & Gas Journal, because it’s behind a paywall:

First, we’re looking in the “Monterey” column, over on the right. Note that it estimates 500 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), which represents the sum total of the oil in the ground. This not based on well data — remember, it hasn’t been fracked much — but on mathematical simulations. Such simulations offer a range of possibilities with different probabilities; it’s likely 500 billion was the mid-point probability. Suffice to say, that’s a highly speculative number.

Next, we’re looking at the “recovery factor” (RF), which is the percentage of the total oil that can technically be recovered — not economically recovered, but recovered with today’s technology, irrespective of price. This chart estimates 2.8 percent, which seems optimistic. The Elm Coulee play in Montana is a “sweet spot,” with comparatively shallow, easy to reach oil; the more common RF for big shale plays is between 1 and 2 percent. The Monterey play faces determined environmental opposition and some unfavorable geography. Once they get in and start drilling, the RF could well fall. It too is speculative.

Anyway, multiply the OOIP by the RF and you get the “estimated ultimately recoverable” (EUR) oil — the amount we might conceivably be able to get out.

OOIP x RF = EUR! Fun.

So in the case of Monterey, 500 billion barrels times 2.8 percent equals 14 billion barrels. That’s the estimate of technically recoverable oil. (The EIA pegs EUR at 15.4 billion barrels, which is what gets used in all the news stories. Not sure why this data set and the EIA differ by a bit — probably a different OOIP or RF estimate — but it’s not that important.)

That’s two speculative numbers multiplied. What if the RF turns out to be 1.4 percent, like in the Niobrara Shale? Well then there’s half as much recoverable oil in Monterey: 7 billion barrels. Fifteen billion barrels would satisfy U.S. oil demand for just over two years; 7 billion would satisfy it for a year or so.

Regardless: the 15 billion barrels figure that gets tossed around confidently by journalists is just this side of a guess, and probably a guess on the high side.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics

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The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California, specifically the Monterey Shale in southern California (see map). Will California become the next North Dakota? Let us ponder.

Oil in California is nothing new — it’s the third highest oil-producing state in the U.S. (after Texas and North Dakota, which recently displaced Alaska for the No. 2 spot). The Monterey area has been drilled for years, profitably, though production has been steadily declining since its peak in the mid ’80s.

However, as you’ve no doubt read in recent breathless media accounts, drilling technology has advanced. Two techniques have been combined: hydro-fracturing, whereby fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) are injected into drill holes to break open tight rock formations, allowing liquid fuels to seep out; and horizontal drilling, whereby drills can travel laterally from drill sites, sometimes miles, allowing a single drill site to cover vastly more area. This is the “fracking” you’ve heard so much about. It puts all kinds of previously inaccessible fossil fuels within reach, albeit expensively. (Oil seems stuck near $100 a barrel, though; with prices that high, all kinds of crazy schemes are economic.)

The Monterey Shale hasn’t been fracked much, at least not with horizontal drilling, but oil companies have got their beady little eyes on it. The typical news report, like this one in The New York Times, pegs the oil resource in the Monterey Shale at just over 15 billion barrels of oil, more than four times the tight oil in the storied Bakken Shale in North Dakota and more than two-thirds of all the tight oil in the country.

(Vocab note: “shale oil” or “tight oil” refers to oil stuck in shale rock formations; “oil shale,” a kind of rock containing kerogen, which can be refined into oil, is a whole different thing — a grosser, even less economic thing.)

A new study from University of Southern California says that fracking all that tight oil could boost the state’s economy by 14 percent. Even for a purportedly green state, that’s a tough offer to refuse. Sure enough, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been making positive noises about it, saying he’s open to it as long as there are proper regulations.

National enviro groups have not put up much resistance so far. They’re busy with Keystone or EPA or the like. But local protestors could use some help. This seems to me like one to fight. Here, in no particular order, are 10 reasons why.

1. This isn’t natural gas we’re talking about, which can displace coal and reduce carbon emissions. This is oil. And it’s heavy, carbon-intensive oil. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) studies the characteristics of each source of oil — extraction and transportation — and assigns it a score, the higher being worse for the climate. California oil scores badly:

Most oil sources worldwide have scores between 5 and 13, under the system used by California Air Resources Board.

[California's] Midway-Sunset oil scores 21.18. Crude from nearby Coalinga scores 25.36. The San Ardo field, whose bobbing pump jacks push up against Highway 101 between King City and San Luis Obispo, scores 28.82.

And the [Canadian] tar sands?

One synthetic oil from the tar sands — Albian Heavy Synthetic — scores 21.02. Another, Suncor Synthetic A, rates 24.49. Syncrude Sweet comes in at 21.87.

California’s oil is as dirty as Canadian tar sands! And with fracking comes increased energy intensity and hundreds more wells. So yeah, this stuff is unambiguously bad from a climate perspective. Depending on how much of that 15 billion barrels gets dug up and burned, it will mean billions and billions of tons of new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe even as much as will be piped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

2. Speaking of the oil being dirty: California recently implemented a “low-carbon fuel standard” requiring producers to decrease the carbon intensity of the fuels they sell in the state. The dirty sludge pulled out of the Monterey Shale is almost certainly not going to meet that standard. That means it can’t be burned in-state. They’ll have to export it.

So California gets the damage to land, air, and water, oil companies get the profit, and other states get the oil. Sweet deal!

3. That 15 billion barrels of oil in Monterey? It is, to put it charitably, speculative.

My editor is convinced that a full discussion of this point is unbearably boring and will drive away this post’s few readers. So I’ve moved the full discussion down to the bottom. Here’s the takeaway:

The amount of technically recoverable oil is determined by multiplying the total amount of oil that USGS estimates is under the Monterey Shale by the “recovery factor,” which is the percentage of the oil that can be recovered with today’s technology. The USGS estimate is based on mathematical models, not data, and is extremely speculative. The recovery factor that’s being used for Monterey is probably optimistic — it’s more than double that of other tight oil plays like the Bakken Shale. Long story short, 15 billion barrels is probably a) wrong and b) high.

For a full discussion of this fascinating matter, scroll down to the bottom of the post.

(I should pause here to say that most of what I know on these subjects I learned from energy analyst Chris Nelder, whose work you should be reading religiously. To better understand unconventional fuels like tight oil, start here and here.)

4. Colorado and North Dakota have fairly “flat beds,” i.e., stacked horizontal layers of rock. California has a messy bed (I owe the analogy to RL Miller), which is to say its layers have been cranked, tossed, folded, and otherwise mangled by frequent earthquakes. California is, you’ll recall, full of fault lines.

That may help explain why, despite the optimistic numbers above, the Monterey Shale has thus far proved something of a disappointment. A story in World Oil (paywalled) notes that disappointing results from Monterey have forced operators to “revisit their geological drawing boards.” The Energy Information Administration estimated that Monterey would produce 550 million barrels per well, but “operators today are reporting typical flowrates averaging only around 350 to 400″ barrels per day. At 400 barrels a day, it would take a well 3,767 years to hit 550 million barrels. Perhaps the EIA was a bit optimistic?

This is from an AP report last year:

… drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. [Alliance Bernstein analyst Bob] Brackett suggests that there are a few characteristics of the geology that could make the field more difficult to develop. There are lots of natural faults in the rock, which means drillers can’t easily control the flow of oil through faults they create. Also, the rock is not under enormous pressure, so there is less force pushing the oil to the surface. And the oil may be relatively thick and sticky, which slows its flow.

If the Monterey had performed as well as the Bakken field in North Dakota or the Eagle Ford in Texas, it would be delivering an additional 300,000 barrels of oil per day by now, Brackett says. Instead, production in California is flat.

“We don’t expect a ‘Bakken Boom’ to strike the San Joaquin Valley,” Brackett wrote. “We expect California production to grow only modestly.”

A story in the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was blunt in reaction to the EIA’s optimistic numbers: “Sounds good, until you realize there is no truly successful Monterey resource play to date.”

The promise of fracking in California is based on hope, not data. The danger is a debt-driven explosion of wells (and the chemicals they bring), followed by a bust as production proves disappointing.

5. Water is always a problem in California, a state that lurches from drought to drought and suffers constant bickering between cities, farmers, fishers, and everyone else over the dwindling resource. According to industry figures [PDF], every fracking well uses between 80,000 and 300,000 gallons of water. (That probably means they use way more than that in reality.)

In addition, as Food & Water Watch says in this informative issue brief, “Increasing demand for fresh water, leaking toxic waste pits, well-cementing failures and injection of chemicals underground all post serious short- and long-term water risk.”

Is this how Californians want to use their dwindling water? To expedite the export of dirty oil?

6. Speaking of water, fracking produces a shit-ton of wastewater. It can’t be disposed of in rivers or on the ground (though it very often leaks, accidentally, into both), so instead it’s typically injected far underground, creating the risk of “induced seismicity,” i.e., earthquakes. The link between injection and seismicity in areas with known faults is pretty well-documented at this point. Here’s a paper on it [PDF] in the journal of the American Geophysical Union. There’s also a great article about it in the latest issue of Mother Jones; it isn’t officially online yet, but it looks like you can get a bootleg copy here.

Less is known about injecting into areas with unknown faults, which are all over California. As far as I can tell, there’s been no research at all on deep injection in California specifically. The Mother Jones piece makes pretty clear that the industry is trying to squelch any discussion of this, but don’t worry, they pledge to “avoid known faults.” What could go wrong? (The 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 50 people, originated in an unknown fault. Just saying.)

7. Most people don’t get this, but getting at tight oil requires a lot of wells, because production at each well falls off pretty quickly. There’s not much data from Monterey yet, because there aren’t a lot of horizontal fracking wells yet, but data from other tight oil plays shows that the depletion rate is high, on the order of 80 or 90 percent the first year. Here’s the production profile of a typical well in the Bakken play:

Other tight oil plays have turned up similar results.

Oil companies are not particularly eager for people to know this. When petroleum geologist and researcher Arthur Berman looked at actual well data, it turned out oil and gas companies had systematically overstated shale well productivity:

With wells falling off quickly, and most early fracking funded by debt, producers are under huge pressure to keep digging new wells. Here’s what that looks like, in a graph put together by French petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, taken from yet another Nelder post:

(For reference: kb/d is thousands of barrels per day; b/d/w is barrels per day per well.)

Nelder writes of this graph:

It tells the real story of tight oil production beautifully. Each well produces a mere 150 barrels or so per day on average, and like shale gas wells, their output declines rapidly after initial production. As [Foreign Policy's Steve] LeVine learned from a Bakken executive, the decline rate can be over 90 percent in the first year, then gradually tapers off. After seven or eight years, wells will have produced over 60 percent of their recoverable reserves. Therefore, you have to keep drilling like hell just to maintain production, and drill even more to increase it. … But at around $7 million per well, these wells are not cheap.

Given the steep decline rates of typical fracking wells, making the thick, hard-to-reach Monterey Shale oil pay off like oil companies want it to pay off — like they’re promising California officials it will pay off — means constantly drilling a swarm of new wells.

Meanwhile, four of California’s top 10 agricultural counties are in frack-targeted areas, which is why agricultural groups are starting to ally with greens against it. Then there are the threatened wells in the Baldwin Hills oil field near Culver City, where oil drilling has already had devastating effects on (largely poor) residents. The local impacts from these wells are no joke, and there are going to be a lot of them.

8. Can Californians trust their government to properly regulate fracking? (That’s what a lot of the borderline somnolent green groups seem to think.) The fracking that has gone on in the state so far seem to have flown completely under the radar of state regulators. Get this, from the L.A. Times:

This new interest in fracking plainly caught California regulators off guard. In January 2011, [state Sen. Fran] Pavley wrote to the state division of oil, gas and geothermal resources, or DOGGR (pronounced “dogger”), asking for information [PDF] about the number and location of fracked wells in the state, the amount of water employed, the permitting process and what was known about the risk to groundwater.

The agency responded with a detailed four-page letter, the gist of which was: “We don’t know nothin’.” Its actual words were: “The Division is unable to identify where and how often hydraulic fracturing occurs within the state.” It also said that “the Division has not yet developed regulations to address this activity.”

So, DOGGR doesn’t know where the fracking is, or how much there is, and it hasn’t bothered to develop any regulations to address it. But now, the agency insists it’s changing. It’s on top of things. This DOGGR. So … yeah. No worries, Californians. You’re in good hands!

9. That USC study about the economic effects of fracking I mentioned up top? DeSmogBlog did a little sniffing around and found oily fingerprints all over it. It was funded by, written by, and reviewed by people with longstanding ties to the industry. California officials might do well to take it with several grains of salt.

10. It is morally wrong to sacrifice the interests of poor people and future generations for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and shareholders. Kinda seems like this one should go without saying, but …

I guess that’s enough for now. If activists rally against California oil fracking, they’ll get the same lectures from VSPs that the Keystone campaign gets: “This one bit of supply won’t make any difference to climate change; as long as demand exists, they’ll get it out somehow; you’re distracting from the carbon tax pony.” But whatever. It’s time for states and oil producers to get the message that moving heaven and earth to reach the world’s filthiest fossil fuels is no longer socially acceptable.

Every junkie needs an intervention.

——
* So, as promised, for you hardcore nerds, more on why the 15 billion number is almost certainly wrong, and most likely high:

Here’s a handy chart that I’m going to steal from this piece in Oil & Gas Journal, because it’s behind a paywall:

First, we’re looking in the “Monterey” column, over on the right. Note that it estimates 500 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), which represents the sum total of the oil in the ground. This not based on well data — remember, it hasn’t been fracked much — but on mathematical simulations. Such simulations offer a range of possibilities with different probabilities; it’s likely 500 billion was the mid-point probability. Suffice to say, that’s a highly speculative number.

Next, we’re looking at the “recovery factor” (RF), which is the percentage of the total oil that can technically be recovered — not economically recovered, but recovered with today’s technology, irrespective of price. This chart estimates 2.8 percent, which seems optimistic. The Elm Coulee play in Montana is a “sweet spot,” with comparatively shallow, easy to reach oil; the more common RF for big shale plays is between 1 and 2 percent. The Monterey play faces determined environmental opposition and some unfavorable geography. Once they get in and start drilling, the RF could well fall. It too is speculative.

Anyway, multiply the OOIP by the RF and you get the “estimated ultimately recoverable” (EUR) oil — the amount we might conceivably be able to get out.

OOIP x RF = EUR! Fun.

So in the case of Monterey, 500 billion barrels times 2.8 percent equals 14 billion barrels. That’s the estimate of technically recoverable oil. (The EIA pegs EUR at 15.4 billion barrels, which is what gets used in all the news stories. Not sure why this data set and the EIA differ by a bit — probably a different OOIP or RF estimate — but it’s not that important.)

That’s two speculative numbers multiplied. What if the RF turns out to be 1.4 percent, like in the Niobrara Shale? Well then there’s half as much recoverable oil in Monterey: 7 billion barrels. Fifteen billion barrels would satisfy U.S. oil demand for just over two years; 7 billion would satisfy it for a year or so.

Regardless: the 15 billion barrels figure that gets tossed around confidently by journalists is just this side of a guess, and probably a guess on the high side.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics

View full post on Grist

Click on graphics in this post to embiggen.

The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California, specifically the Monterey Shale in southern California (see map). Will California become the next North Dakota? Let us ponder.

Oil in California is nothing new — it’s the third highest oil-producing state in the U.S. (after Texas and North Dakota, which recently displaced Alaska for the No. 2 spot). The Monterey area has been drilled for years, profitably, though production has been steadily declining since its peak in the mid ’80s.

However, as you’ve no doubt read in recent breathless media accounts, drilling technology has advanced. Two techniques have been combined: hydro-fracturing, whereby fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) are injected into drill holes to break open tight rock formations, allowing liquid fuels to seep out; and horizontal drilling, whereby drills can travel laterally from drill sites, sometimes miles, allowing a single drill site to cover vastly more area. This is the “fracking” you’ve heard so much about. It puts all kinds of previously inaccessible fossil fuels within reach, albeit expensively. (Oil seems stuck near $100 a barrel, though; with prices that high, all kinds of crazy schemes are economic.)

The Monterey Shale hasn’t been fracked much, at least not with horizontal drilling, but oil companies have got their beady little eyes on it. The typical news report, like this one in The New York Times, pegs the oil resource in the Monterey Shale at just over 15 billion barrels of oil, more than four times the tight oil in the storied Bakken Shale in North Dakota and more than two-thirds of all the tight oil in the country.

(Vocab note: “shale oil” or “tight oil” refers to oil stuck in shale rock formations; “oil shale,” a kind of rock containing kerogen, which can be refined into oil, is a whole different thing — a grosser, even less economic thing.)

A new study from University of Southern California says that fracking all that tight oil could boost the state’s economy by 14 percent. Even for a purportedly green state, that’s a tough offer to refuse. Sure enough, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been making positive noises about it, saying he’s open to it as long as there are proper regulations.

National enviro groups have not put up much resistance so far. They’re busy with Keystone or EPA or the like. But local protestors could use some help. This seems to me like one to fight. Here, in no particular order, are 10 reasons why.

1. This isn’t natural gas we’re talking about, which can displace coal and reduce carbon emissions. This is oil. And it’s heavy, carbon-intensive oil. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) studies the characteristics of each source of oil — extraction and transportation — and assigns it a score, the higher being worse for the climate. California oil scores badly:

Most oil sources worldwide have scores between 5 and 13, under the system used by California Air Resources Board.

[California's] Midway-Sunset oil scores 21.18. Crude from nearby Coalinga scores 25.36. The San Ardo field, whose bobbing pump jacks push up against Highway 101 between King City and San Luis Obispo, scores 28.82.

And the [Canadian] tar sands?

One synthetic oil from the tar sands — Albian Heavy Synthetic — scores 21.02. Another, Suncor Synthetic A, rates 24.49. Syncrude Sweet comes in at 21.87.

California’s oil is as dirty as Canadian tar sands! And with fracking comes increased energy intensity and hundreds more wells. So yeah, this stuff is unambiguously bad from a climate perspective. Depending on how much of that 15 billion barrels gets dug up and burned, it will mean billions and billions of tons of new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe even as much as will be piped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

2. Speaking of the oil being dirty: California recently implemented a “low-carbon fuel standard” requiring producers to decrease the carbon intensity of the fuels they sell in the state. The dirty sludge pulled out of the Monterey Shale is almost certainly not going to meet that standard. That means it can’t be burned in-state. They’ll have to export it.

So California gets the damage to land, air, and water, oil companies get the profit, and other states get the oil. Sweet deal!

3. That 15 billion barrels of oil in Monterey? It is, to put it charitably, speculative.

My editor is convinced that a full discussion of this point is unbearably boring and will drive away this post’s few readers. So I’ve moved the full discussion down to the bottom. Here’s the takeaway:

The amount of technically recoverable oil is determined by multiplying the total amount of oil that USGS estimates is under the Monterey Shale by the “recovery factor,” which is the percentage of the oil that can be recovered with today’s technology. The USGS estimate is based on mathematical models, not data, and is extremely speculative. The recovery factor that’s being used for Monterey is probably optimistic — it’s more than double that of other tight oil plays like the Bakken Shale. Long story short, 15 billion barrels is probably a) wrong and b) high.

For a full discussion of this fascinating matter, scroll down to the bottom of the post.

(I should pause here to say that most of what I know on these subjects I learned from energy analyst Chris Nelder, whose work you should be reading religiously. To better understand unconventional fuels like tight oil, start here and here.)

4. Colorado and North Dakota have fairly “flat beds,” i.e., stacked horizontal layers of rock. California has a messy bed (I owe the analogy to RL Miller), which is to say its layers have been cranked, tossed, folded, and otherwise mangled by frequent earthquakes. California is, you’ll recall, full of fault lines.

That may help explain why, despite the optimistic numbers above, the Monterey Shale has thus far proved something of a disappointment. A story in World Oil (paywalled) notes that disappointing results from Monterey have forced operators to “revisit their geological drawing boards.” The Energy Information Administration estimated that Monterey would produce 550 million barrels per well, but “operators today are reporting typical flowrates averaging only around 350 to 400″ barrels per day. At 400 barrels a day, it would take a well 3,767 years to hit 550 million barrels. Perhaps the EIA was a bit optimistic?

This is from an AP report last year:

… drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. [Alliance Bernstein analyst Bob] Brackett suggests that there are a few characteristics of the geology that could make the field more difficult to develop. There are lots of natural faults in the rock, which means drillers can’t easily control the flow of oil through faults they create. Also, the rock is not under enormous pressure, so there is less force pushing the oil to the surface. And the oil may be relatively thick and sticky, which slows its flow.

If the Monterey had performed as well as the Bakken field in North Dakota or the Eagle Ford in Texas, it would be delivering an additional 300,000 barrels of oil per day by now, Brackett says. Instead, production in California is flat.

“We don’t expect a ‘Bakken Boom’ to strike the San Joaquin Valley,” Brackett wrote. “We expect California production to grow only modestly.”

A story in the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was blunt in reaction to the EIA’s optimistic numbers: “Sounds good, until you realize there is no truly successful Monterey resource play to date.”

The promise of fracking in California is based on hope, not data. The danger is a debt-driven explosion of wells (and the chemicals they bring), followed by a bust as production proves disappointing.

5. Water is always a problem in California, a state that lurches from drought to drought and suffers constant bickering between cities, farmers, fishers, and everyone else over the dwindling resource. According to industry figures [PDF], every fracking well uses between 80,000 and 300,000 gallons of water. (That probably means they use way more than that in reality.)

In addition, as Food & Water Watch says in this informative issue brief, “Increasing demand for fresh water, leaking toxic waste pits, well-cementing failures and injection of chemicals underground all post serious short- and long-term water risk.”

Is this how Californians want to use their dwindling water? To expedite the export of dirty oil?

6. Speaking of water, fracking produces a shit-ton of wastewater. It can’t be disposed of in rivers or on the ground (though it very often leaks, accidentally, into both), so instead it’s typically injected far underground, creating the risk of “induced seismicity,” i.e., earthquakes. The link between injection and seismicity in areas with known faults is pretty well-documented at this point. Here’s a paper on it [PDF] in the journal of the American Geophysical Union. There’s also a great article about it in the latest issue of Mother Jones; it isn’t officially online yet, but it looks like you can get a bootleg copy here.

Less is known about injecting into areas with unknown faults, which are all over California. As far as I can tell, there’s been no research at all on deep injection in California specifically. The Mother Jones piece makes pretty clear that the industry is trying to squelch any discussion of this, but don’t worry, they pledge to “avoid known faults.” What could go wrong? (The 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 50 people, originated in an unknown fault. Just saying.)

7. Most people don’t get this, but getting at tight oil requires a lot of wells, because production at each well falls off pretty quickly. There’s not much data from Monterey yet, because there aren’t a lot of horizontal fracking wells yet, but data from other tight oil plays shows that the depletion rate is high, on the order of 80 or 90 percent the first year. Here’s the production profile of a typical well in the Bakken play:

Other tight oil plays have turned up similar results.

Oil companies are not particularly eager for people to know this. When petroleum geologist and researcher Arthur Berman looked at actual well data, it turned out oil and gas companies had systematically overstated shale well productivity:

With wells falling off quickly, and most early fracking funded by debt, producers are under huge pressure to keep digging new wells. Here’s what that looks like, in a graph put together by French petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, taken from yet another Nelder post:

(For reference: kb/d is thousands of barrels per day; b/d/w is barrels per day per well.)

Nelder writes of this graph:

It tells the real story of tight oil production beautifully. Each well produces a mere 150 barrels or so per day on average, and like shale gas wells, their output declines rapidly after initial production. As [Foreign Policy's Steve] LeVine learned from a Bakken executive, the decline rate can be over 90 percent in the first year, then gradually tapers off. After seven or eight years, wells will have produced over 60 percent of their recoverable reserves. Therefore, you have to keep drilling like hell just to maintain production, and drill even more to increase it. … But at around $7 million per well, these wells are not cheap.

Given the steep decline rates of typical fracking wells, making the thick, hard-to-reach Monterey Shale oil pay off like oil companies want it to pay off — like they’re promising California officials it will pay off — means constantly drilling a swarm of new wells.

Meanwhile, four of California’s top 10 agricultural counties are in frack-targeted areas, which is why agricultural groups are starting to ally with greens against it. Then there are the threatened wells in the Baldwin Hills oil field near Culver City, where oil drilling has already had devastating effects on (largely poor) residents. The local impacts from these wells are no joke, and there are going to be a lot of them.

8. Can Californians trust their government to properly regulate fracking? (That’s what a lot of the borderline somnolent green groups seem to think.) The fracking that has gone on in the state so far seem to have flown completely under the radar of state regulators. Get this, from the L.A. Times:

This new interest in fracking plainly caught California regulators off guard. In January 2011, [state Sen. Fran] Pavley wrote to the state division of oil, gas and geothermal resources, or DOGGR (pronounced “dogger”), asking for information [PDF] about the number and location of fracked wells in the state, the amount of water employed, the permitting process and what was known about the risk to groundwater.

The agency responded with a detailed four-page letter, the gist of which was: “We don’t know nothin’.” Its actual words were: “The Division is unable to identify where and how often hydraulic fracturing occurs within the state.” It also said that “the Division has not yet developed regulations to address this activity.”

So, DOGGR doesn’t know where the fracking is, or how much there is, and it hasn’t bothered to develop any regulations to address it. But now, the agency insists it’s changing. It’s on top of things. This DOGGR. So … yeah. No worries, Californians. You’re in good hands!

9. That USC study about the economic effects of fracking I mentioned up top? DeSmogBlog did a little sniffing around and found oily fingerprints all over it. It was funded by, written by, and reviewed by people with longstanding ties to the industry. California officials might do well to take it with several grains of salt.

10. It is morally wrong to sacrifice the interests of poor people and future generations for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and shareholders. Kinda seems like this one should go without saying, but …

I guess that’s enough for now. If activists rally against California oil fracking, they’ll get the same lectures from VSPs that the Keystone campaign gets: “This one bit of supply won’t make any difference to climate change; as long as demand exists, they’ll get it out somehow; you’re distracting from the carbon tax pony.” But whatever. It’s time for states and oil producers to get the message that moving heaven and earth to reach the world’s filthiest fossil fuels is no longer socially acceptable.

Every junkie needs an intervention.

——
* So, as promised, for you hardcore nerds, more on why the 15 billion number is almost certainly wrong, and most likely high:

Here’s a handy chart that I’m going to steal from this piece in Oil & Gas Journal, because it’s behind a paywall:

First, we’re looking in the “Monterey” column, over on the right. Note that it estimates 500 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), which represents the sum total of the oil in the ground. This not based on well data — remember, it hasn’t been fracked much — but on mathematical simulations. Such simulations offer a range of possibilities with different probabilities; it’s likely 500 billion was the mid-point probability. Suffice to say, that’s a highly speculative number.

Next, we’re looking at the “recovery factor” (RF), which is the percentage of the total oil that can technically be recovered — not economically recovered, but recovered with today’s technology, irrespective of price. This chart estimates 2.8 percent, which seems optimistic. The Elm Coulee play in Montana is a “sweet spot,” with comparatively shallow, easy to reach oil; the more common RF for big shale plays is between 1 and 2 percent. The Monterey play faces determined environmental opposition and some unfavorable geography. Once they get in and start drilling, the RF could well fall. It too is speculative.

Anyway, multiply the OOIP by the RF and you get the “estimated ultimately recoverable” (EUR) oil — the amount we might conceivably be able to get out.

OOIP x RF = EUR! Fun.

So in the case of Monterey, 500 billion barrels times 2.8 percent equals 14 billion barrels. That’s the estimate of technically recoverable oil. (The EIA pegs EUR at 15.4 billion barrels, which is what gets used in all the news stories. Not sure why this data set and the EIA differ by a bit — probably a different OOIP or RF estimate — but it’s not that important.)

That’s two speculative numbers multiplied. What if the RF turns out to be 1.4 percent, like in the Niobrara Shale? Well then there’s half as much recoverable oil in Monterey: 7 billion barrels. Fifteen billion barrels would satisfy U.S. oil demand for just over two years; 7 billion would satisfy it for a year or so.

Regardless: the 15 billion barrels figure that gets tossed around confidently by journalists is just this side of a guess, and probably a guess on the high side.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics

View full post on Grist

Click on graphics in this post to embiggen.

The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California, specifically the Monterey Shale in southern California (see map). Will California become the next North Dakota? Let us ponder.

Oil in California is nothing new — it’s the third highest oil-producing state in the U.S. (after Texas and North Dakota, which recently displaced Alaska for the No. 2 spot). The Monterey area has been drilled for years, profitably, though production has been steadily declining since its peak in the mid ’80s.

However, as you’ve no doubt read in recent breathless media accounts, drilling technology has advanced. Two techniques have been combined: hydro-fracturing, whereby fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) are injected into drill holes to break open tight rock formations, allowing liquid fuels to seep out; and horizontal drilling, whereby drills can travel laterally from drill sites, sometimes miles, allowing a single drill site to cover vastly more area. This is the “fracking” you’ve heard so much about. It puts all kinds of previously inaccessible fossil fuels within reach, albeit expensively. (Oil seems stuck near $100 a barrel, though; with prices that high, all kinds of crazy schemes are economic.)

The Monterey Shale hasn’t been fracked much, at least not with horizontal drilling, but oil companies have got their beady little eyes on it. The typical news report, like this one in The New York Times, pegs the oil resource in the Monterey Shale at just over 15 billion barrels of oil, more than four times the tight oil in the storied Bakken Shale in North Dakota and more than two-thirds of all the tight oil in the country.

(Vocab note: “shale oil” or “tight oil” refers to oil stuck in shale rock formations; “oil shale,” a kind of rock containing kerogen, which can be refined into oil, is a whole different thing — a grosser, even less economic thing.)

A new study from University of Southern California says that fracking all that tight oil could boost the state’s economy by 14 percent. Even for a purportedly green state, that’s a tough offer to refuse. Sure enough, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been making positive noises about it, saying he’s open to it as long as there are proper regulations.

National enviro groups have not put up much resistance so far. They’re busy with Keystone or EPA or the like. But local protestors could use some help. This seems to me like one to fight. Here, in no particular order, are 10 reasons why.

1. This isn’t natural gas we’re talking about, which can displace coal and reduce carbon emissions. This is oil. And it’s heavy, carbon-intensive oil. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) studies the characteristics of each source of oil — extraction and transportation — and assigns it a score, the higher being worse for the climate. California oil scores badly:

Most oil sources worldwide have scores between 5 and 13, under the system used by California Air Resources Board.

[California's] Midway-Sunset oil scores 21.18. Crude from nearby Coalinga scores 25.36. The San Ardo field, whose bobbing pump jacks push up against Highway 101 between King City and San Luis Obispo, scores 28.82.

And the [Canadian] tar sands?

One synthetic oil from the tar sands — Albian Heavy Synthetic — scores 21.02. Another, Suncor Synthetic A, rates 24.49. Syncrude Sweet comes in at 21.87.

California’s oil is as dirty as Canadian tar sands! And with fracking comes increased energy intensity and hundreds more wells. So yeah, this stuff is unambiguously bad from a climate perspective. Depending on how much of that 15 billion barrels gets dug up and burned, it will mean billions and billions of tons of new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe even as much as will be piped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

2. Speaking of the oil being dirty: California recently implemented a “low-carbon fuel standard” requiring producers to decrease the carbon intensity of the fuels they sell in the state. The dirty sludge pulled out of the Monterey Shale is almost certainly not going to meet that standard. That means it can’t be burned in-state. They’ll have to export it.

So California gets the damage to land, air, and water, oil companies get the profit, and other states get the oil. Sweet deal!

3. That 15 billion barrels of oil in Monterey? It is, to put it charitably, speculative.

My editor is convinced that a full discussion of this point is unbearably boring and will drive away this post’s few readers. So I’ve moved the full discussion down to the bottom. Here’s the takeaway:

The amount of technically recoverable oil is determined by multiplying the total amount of oil that USGS estimates is under the Monterey Shale by the “recovery factor,” which is the percentage of the oil that can be recovered with today’s technology. The USGS estimate is based on mathematical models, not data, and is extremely speculative. The recovery factor that’s being used for Monterey is probably optimistic — it’s more than double that of other tight oil plays like the Bakken Shale. Long story short, 15 billion barrels is probably a) wrong and b) high.

For a full discussion of this fascinating matter, scroll down to the bottom of the post.

(I should pause here to say that most of what I know on these subjects I learned from energy analyst Chris Nelder, whose work you should be reading religiously. To better understand unconventional fuels like tight oil, start here and here.)

4. Colorado and North Dakota have fairly “flat beds,” i.e., stacked horizontal layers of rock. California has a messy bed (I owe the analogy to RL Miller), which is to say its layers have been cranked, tossed, folded, and otherwise mangled by frequent earthquakes. California is, you’ll recall, full of fault lines.

That may help explain why, despite the optimistic numbers above, the Monterey Shale has thus far proved something of a disappointment. A story in World Oil (paywalled) notes that disappointing results from Monterey have forced operators to “revisit their geological drawing boards.” The Energy Information Administration estimated that Monterey would produce 550 million barrels per well, but “operators today are reporting typical flowrates averaging only around 350 to 400″ barrels per day. At 400 barrels a day, it would take a well 3,767 years to hit 550 million barrels. Perhaps the EIA was a bit optimistic?

This is from an AP report last year:

… drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. [Alliance Bernstein analyst Bob] Brackett suggests that there are a few characteristics of the geology that could make the field more difficult to develop. There are lots of natural faults in the rock, which means drillers can’t easily control the flow of oil through faults they create. Also, the rock is not under enormous pressure, so there is less force pushing the oil to the surface. And the oil may be relatively thick and sticky, which slows its flow.

If the Monterey had performed as well as the Bakken field in North Dakota or the Eagle Ford in Texas, it would be delivering an additional 300,000 barrels of oil per day by now, Brackett says. Instead, production in California is flat.

“We don’t expect a ‘Bakken Boom’ to strike the San Joaquin Valley,” Brackett wrote. “We expect California production to grow only modestly.”

A story in the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was blunt in reaction to the EIA’s optimistic numbers: “Sounds good, until you realize there is no truly successful Monterey resource play to date.”

The promise of fracking in California is based on hope, not data. The danger is a debt-driven explosion of wells (and the chemicals they bring), followed by a bust as production proves disappointing.

5. Water is always a problem in California, a state that lurches from drought to drought and suffers constant bickering between cities, farmers, fishers, and everyone else over the dwindling resource. According to industry figures [PDF], every fracking well uses between 80,000 and 300,000 gallons of water. (That probably means they use way more than that in reality.)

In addition, as Food & Water Watch says in this informative issue brief, “Increasing demand for fresh water, leaking toxic waste pits, well-cementing failures and injection of chemicals underground all post serious short- and long-term water risk.”

Is this how Californians want to use their dwindling water? To expedite the export of dirty oil?

6. Speaking of water, fracking produces a shit-ton of wastewater. It can’t be disposed of in rivers or on the ground (though it very often leaks, accidentally, into both), so instead it’s typically injected far underground, creating the risk of “induced seismicity,” i.e., earthquakes. The link between injection and seismicity in areas with known faults is pretty well-documented at this point. Here’s a paper on it [PDF] in the journal of the American Geophysical Union. There’s also a great article about it in the latest issue of Mother Jones; it isn’t officially online yet, but it looks like you can get a bootleg copy here.

Less is known about injecting into areas with unknown faults, which are all over California. As far as I can tell, there’s been no research at all on deep injection in California specifically. The Mother Jones piece makes pretty clear that the industry is trying to squelch any discussion of this, but don’t worry, they pledge to “avoid known faults.” What could go wrong? (The 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 50 people, originated in an unknown fault. Just saying.)

7. Most people don’t get this, but getting at tight oil requires a lot of wells, because production at each well falls off pretty quickly. There’s not much data from Monterey yet, because there aren’t a lot of horizontal fracking wells yet, but data from other tight oil plays shows that the depletion rate is high, on the order of 80 or 90 percent the first year. Here’s the production profile of a typical well in the Bakken play:

Other tight oil plays have turned up similar results.

Oil companies are not particularly eager for people to know this. When petroleum geologist and researcher Arthur Berman looked at actual well data, it turned out oil and gas companies had systematically overstated shale well productivity:

With wells falling off quickly, and most early fracking funded by debt, producers are under huge pressure to keep digging new wells. Here’s what that looks like, in a graph put together by French petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, taken from yet another Nelder post:

(For reference: kb/d is thousands of barrels per day; b/d/w is barrels per day per well.)

Nelder writes of this graph:

It tells the real story of tight oil production beautifully. Each well produces a mere 150 barrels or so per day on average, and like shale gas wells, their output declines rapidly after initial production. As [Foreign Policy's Steve] LeVine learned from a Bakken executive, the decline rate can be over 90 percent in the first year, then gradually tapers off. After seven or eight years, wells will have produced over 60 percent of their recoverable reserves. Therefore, you have to keep drilling like hell just to maintain production, and drill even more to increase it. … But at around $7 million per well, these wells are not cheap.

Given the steep decline rates of typical fracking wells, making the thick, hard-to-reach Monterey Shale oil pay off like oil companies want it to pay off — like they’re promising California officials it will pay off — means constantly drilling a swarm of new wells.

Meanwhile, four of California’s top 10 agricultural counties are in frack-targeted areas, which is why agricultural groups are starting to ally with greens against it. Then there are the threatened wells in the Baldwin Hills oil field near Culver City, where oil drilling has already had devastating effects on (largely poor) residents. The local impacts from these wells are no joke, and there are going to be a lot of them.

8. Can Californians trust their government to properly regulate fracking? (That’s what a lot of the borderline somnolent green groups seem to think.) The fracking that has gone on in the state so far seem to have flown completely under the radar of state regulators. Get this, from the L.A. Times:

This new interest in fracking plainly caught California regulators off guard. In January 2011, [state Sen. Fran] Pavley wrote to the state division of oil, gas and geothermal resources, or DOGGR (pronounced “dogger”), asking for information [PDF] about the number and location of fracked wells in the state, the amount of water employed, the permitting process and what was known about the risk to groundwater.

The agency responded with a detailed four-page letter, the gist of which was: “We don’t know nothin’.” Its actual words were: “The Division is unable to identify where and how often hydraulic fracturing occurs within the state.” It also said that “the Division has not yet developed regulations to address this activity.”

So, DOGGR doesn’t know where the fracking is, or how much there is, and it hasn’t bothered to develop any regulations to address it. But now, the agency insists it’s changing. It’s on top of things. This DOGGR. So … yeah. No worries, Californians. You’re in good hands!

9. That USC study about the economic effects of fracking I mentioned up top? DeSmogBlog did a little sniffing around and found oily fingerprints all over it. It was funded by, written by, and reviewed by people with longstanding ties to the industry. California officials might do well to take it with several grains of salt.

10. It is morally wrong to sacrifice the interests of poor people and future generations for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and shareholders. Kinda seems like this one should go without saying, but …

I guess that’s enough for now. If activists rally against California oil fracking, they’ll get the same lectures from VSPs that the Keystone campaign gets: “This one bit of supply won’t make any difference to climate change; as long as demand exists, they’ll get it out somehow; you’re distracting from the carbon tax pony.” But whatever. It’s time for states and oil producers to get the message that moving heaven and earth to reach the world’s filthiest fossil fuels is no longer socially acceptable.

Every junkie needs an intervention.

——
* So, as promised, for you hardcore nerds, more on why the 15 billion number is almost certainly wrong, and most likely high:

Here’s a handy chart that I’m going to steal from this piece in Oil & Gas Journal, because it’s behind a paywall:

First, we’re looking in the “Monterey” column, over on the right. Note that it estimates 500 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), which represents the sum total of the oil in the ground. This not based on well data — remember, it hasn’t been fracked much — but on mathematical simulations. Such simulations offer a range of possibilities with different probabilities; it’s likely 500 billion was the mid-point probability. Suffice to say, that’s a highly speculative number.

Next, we’re looking at the “recovery factor” (RF), which is the percentage of the total oil that can technically be recovered — not economically recovered, but recovered with today’s technology, irrespective of price. This chart estimates 2.8 percent, which seems optimistic. The Elm Coulee play in Montana is a “sweet spot,” with comparatively shallow, easy to reach oil; the more common RF for big shale plays is between 1 and 2 percent. The Monterey play faces determined environmental opposition and some unfavorable geography. Once they get in and start drilling, the RF could well fall. It too is speculative.

Anyway, multiply the OOIP by the RF and you get the “estimated ultimately recoverable” (EUR) oil — the amount we might conceivably be able to get out.

OOIP x RF = EUR! Fun.

So in the case of Monterey, 500 billion barrels times 2.8 percent equals 14 billion barrels. That’s the estimate of technically recoverable oil. (The EIA pegs EUR at 15.4 billion barrels, which is what gets used in all the news stories. Not sure why this data set and the EIA differ by a bit — probably a different OOIP or RF estimate — but it’s not that important.)

That’s two speculative numbers multiplied. What if the RF turns out to be 1.4 percent, like in the Niobrara Shale? Well then there’s half as much recoverable oil in Monterey: 7 billion barrels. Fifteen billion barrels would satisfy U.S. oil demand for just over two years; 7 billion would satisfy it for a year or so.

Regardless: the 15 billion barrels figure that gets tossed around confidently by journalists is just this side of a guess, and probably a guess on the high side.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics

View full post on Grist

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Click on graphics in this post to embiggen.

The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California, specifically the Monterey Shale in southern California (see map). Will California become the next North Dakota? Let us ponder.

Oil in California is nothing new — it’s the third highest oil-producing state in the U.S. (after Texas and North Dakota, which recently displaced Alaska for the No. 2 spot). The Monterey area has been drilled for years, profitably, though production has been steadily declining since its peak in the mid ’80s.

However, as you’ve no doubt read in recent breathless media accounts, drilling technology has advanced. Two techniques have been combined: hydro-fracturing, whereby fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) are injected into drill holes to break open tight rock formations, allowing liquid fuels to seep out; and horizontal drilling, whereby drills can travel laterally from drill sites, sometimes miles, allowing a single drill site to cover vastly more area. This is the “fracking” you’ve heard so much about. It puts all kinds of previously inaccessible fossil fuels within reach, albeit expensively. (Oil seems stuck near $100 a barrel, though; with prices that high, all kinds of crazy schemes are economic.)

The Monterey Shale hasn’t been fracked much, at least not with horizontal drilling, but oil companies have got their beady little eyes on it. The typical news report, like this one in The New York Times, pegs the oil resource in the Monterey Shale at just over 15 billion barrels of oil, more than four times the tight oil in the storied Bakken Shale in North Dakota and more than two-thirds of all the tight oil in the country.

(Vocab note: “shale oil” or “tight oil” refers to oil stuck in shale rock formations; “oil shale,” a kind of rock containing kerogen, which can be refined into oil, is a whole different thing — a grosser, even less economic thing.)

A new study from University of Southern California says that fracking all that tight oil could boost the state’s economy by 14 percent. Even for a purportedly green state, that’s a tough offer to refuse. Sure enough, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been making positive noises about it, saying he’s open to it as long as there are proper regulations.

National enviro groups have not put up much resistance so far. They’re busy with Keystone or EPA or the like. But local protestors could use some help. This seems to me like one to fight. Here, in no particular order, are 10 reasons why.

1. This isn’t natural gas we’re talking about, which can displace coal and reduce carbon emissions. This is oil. And it’s heavy, carbon-intensive oil. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) studies the characteristics of each source of oil — extraction and transportation — and assigns it a score, the higher being worse for the climate. California oil scores badly:

Most oil sources worldwide have scores between 5 and 13, under the system used by California Air Resources Board.

[California's] Midway-Sunset oil scores 21.18. Crude from nearby Coalinga scores 25.36. The San Ardo field, whose bobbing pump jacks push up against Highway 101 between King City and San Luis Obispo, scores 28.82.

And the [Canadian] tar sands?

One synthetic oil from the tar sands — Albian Heavy Synthetic — scores 21.02. Another, Suncor Synthetic A, rates 24.49. Syncrude Sweet comes in at 21.87.

California’s oil is as dirty as Canadian tar sands! And with fracking comes increased energy intensity and hundreds more wells. So yeah, this stuff is unambiguously bad from a climate perspective. Depending on how much of that 15 billion barrels gets dug up and burned, it will mean billions and billions of tons of new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe even as much as will be piped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

2. Speaking of the oil being dirty: California recently implemented a “low-carbon fuel standard” requiring producers to decrease the carbon intensity of the fuels they sell in the state. The dirty sludge pulled out of the Monterey Shale is almost certainly not going to meet that standard. That means it can’t be burned in-state. They’ll have to export it.

So California gets the damage to land, air, and water, oil companies get the profit, and other states get the oil. Sweet deal!

3. That 15 billion barrels of oil in Monterey? It is, to put it charitably, speculative.

My editor is convinced that a full discussion of this point is unbearably boring and will drive away this post’s few readers. So I’ve moved the full discussion down to the bottom. Here’s the takeaway:

The amount of technically recoverable oil is determined by multiplying the total amount of oil that USGS estimates is under the Monterey Shale by the “recovery factor,” which is the percentage of the oil that can be recovered with today’s technology. The USGS estimate is based on mathematical models, not data, and is extremely speculative. The recovery factor that’s being used for Monterey is probably optimistic — it’s more than double that of other tight oil plays like the Bakken Shale. Long story short, 15 billion barrels is probably a) wrong and b) high.

For a full discussion of this fascinating matter, scroll down to the bottom of the post.

(I should pause here to say that most of what I know on these subjects I learned from energy analyst Chris Nelder, whose work you should be reading religiously. To better understand unconventional fuels like tight oil, start here and here.)

4. Colorado and North Dakota have fairly “flat beds,” i.e., stacked horizontal layers of rock. California has a messy bed (I owe the analogy to RL Miller), which is to say its layers have been cranked, tossed, folded, and otherwise mangled by frequent earthquakes. California is, you’ll recall, full of fault lines.

That may help explain why, despite the optimistic numbers above, the Monterey Shale has thus far proved something of a disappointment. A story in World Oil (paywalled) notes that disappointing results from Monterey have forced operators to “revisit their geological drawing boards.” The Energy Information Administration estimated that Monterey would produce 550 million barrels per well, but “operators today are reporting typical flowrates averaging only around 350 to 400″ barrels per day. At 400 barrels a day, it would take a well 3,767 years to hit 550 million barrels. Perhaps the EIA was a bit optimistic?

This is from an AP report last year:

… drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. [Alliance Bernstein analyst Bob] Brackett suggests that there are a few characteristics of the geology that could make the field more difficult to develop. There are lots of natural faults in the rock, which means drillers can’t easily control the flow of oil through faults they create. Also, the rock is not under enormous pressure, so there is less force pushing the oil to the surface. And the oil may be relatively thick and sticky, which slows its flow.

If the Monterey had performed as well as the Bakken field in North Dakota or the Eagle Ford in Texas, it would be delivering an additional 300,000 barrels of oil per day by now, Brackett says. Instead, production in California is flat.

“We don’t expect a ‘Bakken Boom’ to strike the San Joaquin Valley,” Brackett wrote. “We expect California production to grow only modestly.”

A story in the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was blunt in reaction to the EIA’s optimistic numbers: “Sounds good, until you realize there is no truly successful Monterey resource play to date.”

The promise of fracking in California is based on hope, not data. The danger is a debt-driven explosion of wells (and the chemicals they bring), followed by a bust as production proves disappointing.

5. Water is always a problem in California, a state that lurches from drought to drought and suffers constant bickering between cities, farmers, fishers, and everyone else over the dwindling resource. According to industry figures [PDF], every fracking well uses between 80,000 and 300,000 gallons of water. (That probably means they use way more than that in reality.)

In addition, as Food & Water Watch says in this informative issue brief, “Increasing demand for fresh water, leaking toxic waste pits, well-cementing failures and injection of chemicals underground all post serious short- and long-term water risk.”

Is this how Californians want to use their dwindling water? To expedite the export of dirty oil?

6. Speaking of water, fracking produces a shit-ton of wastewater. It can’t be disposed of in rivers or on the ground (though it very often leaks, accidentally, into both), so instead it’s typically injected far underground, creating the risk of “induced seismicity,” i.e., earthquakes. The link between injection and seismicity in areas with known faults is pretty well-documented at this point. Here’s a paper on it [PDF] in the journal of the American Geophysical Union. There’s also a great article about it in the latest issue of Mother Jones; it isn’t officially online yet, but it looks like you can get a bootleg copy here.

Less is known about injecting into areas with unknown faults, which are all over California. As far as I can tell, there’s been no research at all on deep injection in California specifically. The Mother Jones piece makes pretty clear that the industry is trying to squelch any discussion of this, but don’t worry, they pledge to “avoid known faults.” What could go wrong? (The 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 50 people, originated in an unknown fault. Just saying.)

7. Most people don’t get this, but getting at tight oil requires a lot of wells, because production at each well falls off pretty quickly. There’s not much data from Monterey yet, because there aren’t a lot of horizontal fracking wells yet, but data from other tight oil plays shows that the depletion rate is high, on the order of 80 or 90 percent the first year. Here’s the production profile of a typical well in the Bakken play:

Other tight oil plays have turned up similar results.

Oil companies are not particularly eager for people to know this. When petroleum geologist and researcher Arthur Berman looked at actual well data, it turned out oil and gas companies had systematically overstated shale well productivity:

With wells falling off quickly, and most early fracking funded by debt, producers are under huge pressure to keep digging new wells. Here’s what that looks like, in a graph put together by French petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, taken from yet another Nelder post:

(For reference: kb/d is thousands of barrels per day; b/d/w is barrels per day per well.)

Nelder writes of this graph:

It tells the real story of tight oil production beautifully. Each well produces a mere 150 barrels or so per day on average, and like shale gas wells, their output declines rapidly after initial production. As [Foreign Policy's Steve] LeVine learned from a Bakken executive, the decline rate can be over 90 percent in the first year, then gradually tapers off. After seven or eight years, wells will have produced over 60 percent of their recoverable reserves. Therefore, you have to keep drilling like hell just to maintain production, and drill even more to increase it. … But at around $7 million per well, these wells are not cheap.

Given the steep decline rates of typical fracking wells, making the thick, hard-to-reach Monterey Shale oil pay off like oil companies want it to pay off — like they’re promising California officials it will pay off — means constantly drilling a swarm of new wells.

Meanwhile, four of California’s top 10 agricultural counties are in frack-targeted areas, which is why agricultural groups are starting to ally with greens against it. Then there are the threatened wells in the Baldwin Hills oil field near Culver City, where oil drilling has already had devastating effects on (largely poor) residents. The local impacts from these wells are no joke, and there are going to be a lot of them.

8. Can Californians trust their government to properly regulate fracking? (That’s what a lot of the borderline somnolent green groups seem to think.) The fracking that has gone on in the state so far seem to have flown completely under the radar of state regulators. Get this, from the L.A. Times:

This new interest in fracking plainly caught California regulators off guard. In January 2011, [state Sen. Fran] Pavley wrote to the state division of oil, gas and geothermal resources, or DOGGR (pronounced “dogger”), asking for information [PDF] about the number and location of fracked wells in the state, the amount of water employed, the permitting process and what was known about the risk to groundwater.

The agency responded with a detailed four-page letter, the gist of which was: “We don’t know nothin’.” Its actual words were: “The Division is unable to identify where and how often hydraulic fracturing occurs within the state.” It also said that “the Division has not yet developed regulations to address this activity.”

So, DOGGR doesn’t know where the fracking is, or how much there is, and it hasn’t bothered to develop any regulations to address it. But now, the agency insists it’s changing. It’s on top of things. This DOGGR. So … yeah. No worries, Californians. You’re in good hands!

9. That USC study about the economic effects of fracking I mentioned up top? DeSmogBlog did a little sniffing around and found oily fingerprints all over it. It was funded by, written by, and reviewed by people with longstanding ties to the industry. California officials might do well to take it with several grains of salt.

10. It is morally wrong to sacrifice the interests of poor people and future generations for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and shareholders. Kinda seems like this one should go without saying, but …

I guess that’s enough for now. If activists rally against California oil fracking, they’ll get the same lectures from VSPs that the Keystone campaign gets: “This one bit of supply won’t make any difference to climate change; as long as demand exists, they’ll get it out somehow; you’re distracting from the carbon tax pony.” But whatever. It’s time for states and oil producers to get the message that moving heaven and earth to reach the world’s filthiest fossil fuels is no longer socially acceptable.

Every junkie needs an intervention.

——
* So, as promised, for you hardcore nerds, more on why the 15 billion number is almost certainly wrong, and most likely high:

Here’s a handy chart that I’m going to steal from this piece in Oil & Gas Journal, because it’s behind a paywall:

First, we’re looking in the “Monterey” column, over on the right. Note that it estimates 500 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), which represents the sum total of the oil in the ground. This not based on well data — remember, it hasn’t been fracked much — but on mathematical simulations. Such simulations offer a range of possibilities with different probabilities; it’s likely 500 billion was the mid-point probability. Suffice to say, that’s a highly speculative number.

Next, we’re looking at the “recovery factor” (RF), which is the percentage of the total oil that can technically be recovered — not economically recovered, but recovered with today’s technology, irrespective of price. This chart estimates 2.8 percent, which seems optimistic. The Elm Coulee play in Montana is a “sweet spot,” with comparatively shallow, easy to reach oil; the more common RF for big shale plays is between 1 and 2 percent. The Monterey play faces determined environmental opposition and some unfavorable geography. Once they get in and start drilling, the RF could well fall. It too is speculative.

Anyway, multiply the OOIP by the RF and you get the “estimated ultimately recoverable” (EUR) oil — the amount we might conceivably be able to get out.

OOIP x RF = EUR! Fun.

So in the case of Monterey, 500 billion barrels times 2.8 percent equals 14 billion barrels. That’s the estimate of technically recoverable oil. (The EIA pegs EUR at 15.4 billion barrels, which is what gets used in all the news stories. Not sure why this data set and the EIA differ by a bit — probably a different OOIP or RF estimate — but it’s not that important.)

That’s two speculative numbers multiplied. What if the RF turns out to be 1.4 percent, like in the Niobrara Shale? Well then there’s half as much recoverable oil in Monterey: 7 billion barrels. Fifteen billion barrels would satisfy U.S. oil demand for just over two years; 7 billion would satisfy it for a year or so.

Regardless: the 15 billion barrels figure that gets tossed around confidently by journalists is just this side of a guess, and probably a guess on the high side.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics

View full post on Grist

Click on graphics in this post to embiggen.

The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California, specifically the Monterey Shale in southern California (see map). Will California become the next North Dakota? Let us ponder.

Oil in California is nothing new — it’s the third highest oil-producing state in the U.S. (after Texas and North Dakota, which recently displaced Alaska for the No. 2 spot). The Monterey area has been drilled for years, profitably, though production has been steadily declining since its peak in the mid ’80s.

However, as you’ve no doubt read in recent breathless media accounts, drilling technology has advanced. Two techniques have been combined: hydro-fracturing, whereby fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) are injected into drill holes to break open tight rock formations, allowing liquid fuels to seep out; and horizontal drilling, whereby drills can travel laterally from drill sites, sometimes miles, allowing a single drill site to cover vastly more area. This is the “fracking” you’ve heard so much about. It puts all kinds of previously inaccessible fossil fuels within reach, albeit expensively. (Oil seems stuck near $100 a barrel, though; with prices that high, all kinds of crazy schemes are economic.)

The Monterey Shale hasn’t been fracked much, at least not with horizontal drilling, but oil companies have got their beady little eyes on it. The typical news report, like this one in The New York Times, pegs the oil resource in the Monterey Shale at just over 15 billion barrels of oil, more than four times the tight oil in the storied Bakken Shale in North Dakota and more than two-thirds of all the tight oil in the country.

(Vocab note: “shale oil” or “tight oil” refers to oil stuck in shale rock formations; “oil shale,” a kind of rock containing kerogen, which can be refined into oil, is a whole different thing — a grosser, even less economic thing.)

A new study from University of Southern California says that fracking all that tight oil could boost the state’s economy by 14 percent. Even for a purportedly green state, that’s a tough offer to refuse. Sure enough, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been making positive noises about it, saying he’s open to it as long as there are proper regulations.

National enviro groups have not put up much resistance so far. They’re busy with Keystone or EPA or the like. But local protestors could use some help. This seems to me like one to fight. Here, in no particular order, are 10 reasons why.

1. This isn’t natural gas we’re talking about, which can displace coal and reduce carbon emissions. This is oil. And it’s heavy, carbon-intensive oil. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) studies the characteristics of each source of oil — extraction and transportation — and assigns it a score, the higher being worse for the climate. California oil scores badly:

Most oil sources worldwide have scores between 5 and 13, under the system used by California Air Resources Board.

[California's] Midway-Sunset oil scores 21.18. Crude from nearby Coalinga scores 25.36. The San Ardo field, whose bobbing pump jacks push up against Highway 101 between King City and San Luis Obispo, scores 28.82.

And the [Canadian] tar sands?

One synthetic oil from the tar sands — Albian Heavy Synthetic — scores 21.02. Another, Suncor Synthetic A, rates 24.49. Syncrude Sweet comes in at 21.87.

California’s oil is as dirty as Canadian tar sands! And with fracking comes increased energy intensity and hundreds more wells. So yeah, this stuff is unambiguously bad from a climate perspective. Depending on how much of that 15 billion barrels gets dug up and burned, it will mean billions and billions of tons of new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe even as much as will be piped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

2. Speaking of the oil being dirty: California recently implemented a “low-carbon fuel standard” requiring producers to decrease the carbon intensity of the fuels they sell in the state. The dirty sludge pulled out of the Monterey Shale is almost certainly not going to meet that standard. That means it can’t be burned in-state. They’ll have to export it.

So California gets the damage to land, air, and water, oil companies get the profit, and other states get the oil. Sweet deal!

3. That 15 billion barrels of oil in Monterey? It is, to put it charitably, speculative.

My editor is convinced that a full discussion of this point is unbearably boring and will drive away this post’s few readers. So I’ve moved the full discussion down to the bottom. Here’s the takeaway:

The amount of technically recoverable oil is determined by multiplying the total amount of oil that USGS estimates is under the Monterey Shale by the “recovery factor,” which is the percentage of the oil that can be recovered with today’s technology. The USGS estimate is based on mathematical models, not data, and is extremely speculative. The recovery factor that’s being used for Monterey is probably optimistic — it’s more than double that of other tight oil plays like the Bakken Shale. Long story short, 15 billion barrels is probably a) wrong and b) high.

For a full discussion of this fascinating matter, scroll down to the bottom of the post.

(I should pause here to say that most of what I know on these subjects I learned from energy analyst Chris Nelder, whose work you should be reading religiously. To better understand unconventional fuels like tight oil, start here and here.)

4. Colorado and North Dakota have fairly “flat beds,” i.e., stacked horizontal layers of rock. California has a messy bed (I owe the analogy to RL Miller), which is to say its layers have been cranked, tossed, folded, and otherwise mangled by frequent earthquakes. California is, you’ll recall, full of fault lines.

That may help explain why, despite the optimistic numbers above, the Monterey Shale has thus far proved something of a disappointment. A story in World Oil (paywalled) notes that disappointing results from Monterey have forced operators to “revisit their geological drawing boards.” The Energy Information Administration estimated that Monterey would produce 550 million barrels per well, but “operators today are reporting typical flowrates averaging only around 350 to 400″ barrels per day. At 400 barrels a day, it would take a well 3,767 years to hit 550 million barrels. Perhaps the EIA was a bit optimistic?

This is from an AP report last year:

… drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. [Alliance Bernstein analyst Bob] Brackett suggests that there are a few characteristics of the geology that could make the field more difficult to develop. There are lots of natural faults in the rock, which means drillers can’t easily control the flow of oil through faults they create. Also, the rock is not under enormous pressure, so there is less force pushing the oil to the surface. And the oil may be relatively thick and sticky, which slows its flow.

If the Monterey had performed as well as the Bakken field in North Dakota or the Eagle Ford in Texas, it would be delivering an additional 300,000 barrels of oil per day by now, Brackett says. Instead, production in California is flat.

“We don’t expect a ‘Bakken Boom’ to strike the San Joaquin Valley,” Brackett wrote. “We expect California production to grow only modestly.”

A story in the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was blunt in reaction to the EIA’s optimistic numbers: “Sounds good, until you realize there is no truly successful Monterey resource play to date.”

The promise of fracking in California is based on hope, not data. The danger is a debt-driven explosion of wells (and the chemicals they bring), followed by a bust as production proves disappointing.

5. Water is always a problem in California, a state that lurches from drought to drought and suffers constant bickering between cities, farmers, fishers, and everyone else over the dwindling resource. According to industry figures [PDF], every fracking well uses between 80,000 and 300,000 gallons of water. (That probably means they use way more than that in reality.)

In addition, as Food & Water Watch says in this informative issue brief, “Increasing demand for fresh water, leaking toxic waste pits, well-cementing failures and injection of chemicals underground all post serious short- and long-term water risk.”

Is this how Californians want to use their dwindling water? To expedite the export of dirty oil?

6. Speaking of water, fracking produces a shit-ton of wastewater. It can’t be disposed of in rivers or on the ground (though it very often leaks, accidentally, into both), so instead it’s typically injected far underground, creating the risk of “induced seismicity,” i.e., earthquakes. The link between injection and seismicity in areas with known faults is pretty well-documented at this point. Here’s a paper on it [PDF] in the journal of the American Geophysical Union. There’s also a great article about it in the latest issue of Mother Jones; it isn’t officially online yet, but it looks like you can get a bootleg copy here.

Less is known about injecting into areas with unknown faults, which are all over California. As far as I can tell, there’s been no research at all on deep injection in California specifically. The Mother Jones piece makes pretty clear that the industry is trying to squelch any discussion of this, but don’t worry, they pledge to “avoid known faults.” What could go wrong? (The 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 50 people, originated in an unknown fault. Just saying.)

7. Most people don’t get this, but getting at tight oil requires a lot of wells, because production at each well falls off pretty quickly. There’s not much data from Monterey yet, because there aren’t a lot of horizontal fracking wells yet, but data from other tight oil plays shows that the depletion rate is high, on the order of 80 or 90 percent the first year. Here’s the production profile of a typical well in the Bakken play:

Other tight oil plays have turned up similar results.

Oil companies are not particularly eager for people to know this. When petroleum geologist and researcher Arthur Berman looked at actual well data, it turned out oil and gas companies had systematically overstated shale well productivity:

With wells falling off quickly, and most early fracking funded by debt, producers are under huge pressure to keep digging new wells. Here’s what that looks like, in a graph put together by French petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, taken from yet another Nelder post:

(For reference: kb/d is thousands of barrels per day; b/d/w is barrels per day per well.)

Nelder writes of this graph:

It tells the real story of tight oil production beautifully. Each well produces a mere 150 barrels or so per day on average, and like shale gas wells, their output declines rapidly after initial production. As [Foreign Policy's Steve] LeVine learned from a Bakken executive, the decline rate can be over 90 percent in the first year, then gradually tapers off. After seven or eight years, wells will have produced over 60 percent of their recoverable reserves. Therefore, you have to keep drilling like hell just to maintain production, and drill even more to increase it. … But at around $7 million per well, these wells are not cheap.

Given the steep decline rates of typical fracking wells, making the thick, hard-to-reach Monterey Shale oil pay off like oil companies want it to pay off — like they’re promising California officials it will pay off — means constantly drilling a swarm of new wells.

Meanwhile, four of California’s top 10 agricultural counties are in frack-targeted areas, which is why agricultural groups are starting to ally with greens against it. Then there are the threatened wells in the Baldwin Hills oil field near Culver City, where oil drilling has already had devastating effects on (largely poor) residents. The local impacts from these wells are no joke, and there are going to be a lot of them.

8. Can Californians trust their government to properly regulate fracking? (That’s what a lot of the borderline somnolent green groups seem to think.) The fracking that has gone on in the state so far seem to have flown completely under the radar of state regulators. Get this, from the L.A. Times:

This new interest in fracking plainly caught California regulators off guard. In January 2011, [state Sen. Fran] Pavley wrote to the state division of oil, gas and geothermal resources, or DOGGR (pronounced “dogger”), asking for information [PDF] about the number and location of fracked wells in the state, the amount of water employed, the permitting process and what was known about the risk to groundwater.

The agency responded with a detailed four-page letter, the gist of which was: “We don’t know nothin’.” Its actual words were: “The Division is unable to identify where and how often hydraulic fracturing occurs within the state.” It also said that “the Division has not yet developed regulations to address this activity.”

So, DOGGR doesn’t know where the fracking is, or how much there is, and it hasn’t bothered to develop any regulations to address it. But now, the agency insists it’s changing. It’s on top of things. This DOGGR. So … yeah. No worries, Californians. You’re in good hands!

9. That USC study about the economic effects of fracking I mentioned up top? DeSmogBlog did a little sniffing around and found oily fingerprints all over it. It was funded by, written by, and reviewed by people with longstanding ties to the industry. California officials might do well to take it with several grains of salt.

10. It is morally wrong to sacrifice the interests of poor people and future generations for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and shareholders. Kinda seems like this one should go without saying, but …

I guess that’s enough for now. If activists rally against California oil fracking, they’ll get the same lectures from VSPs that the Keystone campaign gets: “This one bit of supply won’t make any difference to climate change; as long as demand exists, they’ll get it out somehow; you’re distracting from the carbon tax pony.” But whatever. It’s time for states and oil producers to get the message that moving heaven and earth to reach the world’s filthiest fossil fuels is no longer socially acceptable.

Every junkie needs an intervention.

——
* So, as promised, for you hardcore nerds, more on why the 15 billion number is almost certainly wrong, and most likely high:

Here’s a handy chart that I’m going to steal from this piece in Oil & Gas Journal, because it’s behind a paywall:

First, we’re looking in the “Monterey” column, over on the right. Note that it estimates 500 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), which represents the sum total of the oil in the ground. This not based on well data — remember, it hasn’t been fracked much — but on mathematical simulations. Such simulations offer a range of possibilities with different probabilities; it’s likely 500 billion was the mid-point probability. Suffice to say, that’s a highly speculative number.

Next, we’re looking at the “recovery factor” (RF), which is the percentage of the total oil that can technically be recovered — not economically recovered, but recovered with today’s technology, irrespective of price. This chart estimates 2.8 percent, which seems optimistic. The Elm Coulee play in Montana is a “sweet spot,” with comparatively shallow, easy to reach oil; the more common RF for big shale plays is between 1 and 2 percent. The Monterey play faces determined environmental opposition and some unfavorable geography. Once they get in and start drilling, the RF could well fall. It too is speculative.

Anyway, multiply the OOIP by the RF and you get the “estimated ultimately recoverable” (EUR) oil — the amount we might conceivably be able to get out.

OOIP x RF = EUR! Fun.

So in the case of Monterey, 500 billion barrels times 2.8 percent equals 14 billion barrels. That’s the estimate of technically recoverable oil. (The EIA pegs EUR at 15.4 billion barrels, which is what gets used in all the news stories. Not sure why this data set and the EIA differ by a bit — probably a different OOIP or RF estimate — but it’s not that important.)

That’s two speculative numbers multiplied. What if the RF turns out to be 1.4 percent, like in the Niobrara Shale? Well then there’s half as much recoverable oil in Monterey: 7 billion barrels. Fifteen billion barrels would satisfy U.S. oil demand for just over two years; 7 billion would satisfy it for a year or so.

Regardless: the 15 billion barrels figure that gets tossed around confidently by journalists is just this side of a guess, and probably a guess on the high side.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics

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The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California, specifically the Monterey Shale in southern California (see map). Will California become the next North Dakota? Let us ponder.

Oil in California is nothing new — it’s the third highest oil-producing state in the U.S. (after Texas and North Dakota, which recently displaced Alaska for the No. 2 spot). The Monterey area has been drilled for years, profitably, though production has been steadily declining since its peak in the mid ’80s.

However, as you’ve no doubt read in recent breathless media accounts, drilling technology has advanced. Two techniques have been combined: hydro-fracturing, whereby fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) are injected into drill holes to break open tight rock formations, allowing liquid fuels to seep out; and horizontal drilling, whereby drills can travel laterally from drill sites, sometimes miles, allowing a single drill site to cover vastly more area. This is the “fracking” you’ve heard so much about. It puts all kinds of previously inaccessible fossil fuels within reach, albeit expensively. (Oil seems stuck near $100 a barrel, though; with prices that high, all kinds of crazy schemes are economic.)

The Monterey Shale hasn’t been fracked much, at least not with horizontal drilling, but oil companies have got their beady little eyes on it. The typical news report, like this one in The New York Times, pegs the oil resource in the Monterey Shale at just over 15 billion barrels of oil, more than four times the tight oil in the storied Bakken Shale in North Dakota and more than two-thirds of all the tight oil in the country.

(Vocab note: “shale oil” or “tight oil” refers to oil stuck in shale rock formations; “oil shale,” a kind of rock containing kerogen, which can be refined into oil, is a whole different thing — a grosser, even less economic thing.)

A new study from University of Southern California says that fracking all that tight oil could boost the state’s economy by 14 percent. Even for a purportedly green state, that’s a tough offer to refuse. Sure enough, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been making positive noises about it, saying he’s open to it as long as there are proper regulations.

National enviro groups have not put up much resistance so far. They’re busy with Keystone or EPA or the like. But local protestors could use some help. This seems to me like one to fight. Here, in no particular order, are ten reasons why.

1. This isn’t natural gas we’re talking about, which can displace coal and reduce carbon emissions. This is oil. And it’s heavy, carbon-intensive oil. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) studies the characteristics of each source of oil — extraction and transportation — and assigns it a score, the higher being worse for the climate. California oil scores badly:

Most oil sources worldwide have scores between 5 and 13, under the system used by California Air Resources Board.

[California's] Midway-Sunset oil scores 21.18. Crude from nearby Coalinga scores 25.36. The San Ardo field, whose bobbing pump jacks push up against Highway 101 between King City and San Luis Obispo, scores 28.82.

And the [Canadian] tar sands?

One synthetic oil from the tar sands — Albian Heavy Synthetic — scores 21.02. Another, Suncor Synthetic A, rates 24.49. Syncrude Sweet comes in at 21.87.

California’s oil is as dirty as Canadian tar sands! And with fracking comes increased energy intensity and hundreds more wells. So yeah, this stuff is unambiguously bad from a climate perspective. Depending on how much of that 15 billion barrels gets dug up and burned, it will mean billions and billions of tons of new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe even as much as will be piped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

2. Speaking of the oil being dirty: California recently implemented a “low-carbon fuel standard” requiring producers to decrease the carbon intensity of the fuels they sell in the state. The dirty sludge pulled out of the Monterey Shale is almost certainly not going to meet that standard. That means it can’t be burned in-state. They’ll have to export it.

So California gets the damage to land, air, and water, oil companies get the profit, and other states get the oil. Sweet deal!

3. That 15 billion barrels of oil in Monterey? It is, to put it charitably, speculative.

My editor is convinced that a full discussion of this point is unbearably boring and will drive away this post’s few readers. So I’ve moved the full discussion down to the bottom. Here’s the takeaway:

The amount of technically recoverable oil is determined by multiplying the total amount of oil that USGS estimates is under the Monterey Shale by the “recovery factor,” which is the percentage of the oil that can be recovered with today’s technology. The USGS estimate is based on mathematical models, not data, and is extremely speculative. The recovery factor that’s being used for Monterey is probably optimistic — it’s more than double that of other tight oil plays like the Bakken Shale. Long story short, 15 billion barrels is probably a) wrong and b) high.

For a full discussion of this fascinating matter, scroll down to the bottom of the post.

(I should pause here to say that most of what I know on these subjects I learned from energy analyst Chris Nelder, who’s work you should be reading religiously. To better understand unconventional fuels like tight oil, start here and here.)

4. Colorado and North Dakota have fairly “flat beds,” i.e., stacked horizontal layers of rock. California has a messy bed (I owe the analogy to RL Miller), which is to say its layers have been cranked, tossed, folded, and otherwise mangled by frequent earthquakes. California is, you’ll recall, full of fault lines.

That may help explain why, despite the optimistic numbers above, the Monterey Shale has thus far proved something of a disappointment. A story in World Oil (paywalled) notes that disappointing results from Monterey have forced operators to “revisit their geological drawing boards.” The Energy Information Administration estimated that Monterey would produce 550 million barrels per well per day, but “operators today are reporting typical flowrates averaging only around 350 to 400.”

Whacking 25 percent off your flow rates means that it takes longer to get the oil, you need to drill more wells, and it’s more difficult to get financing.

This is from an AP report last year:

… drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. [Alliance Bernstein analyst Bob] Brackett suggests that there are a few characteristics of the geology that could make the field more difficult to develop. There are lots of natural faults in the rock, which means drillers can’t easily control the flow of oil through faults they create. Also, the rock is not under enormous pressure, so there is less force pushing the oil to the surface. And the oil may be relatively thick and sticky, which slows its flow.

If the Monterey had performed as well as the Bakken field in North Dakota or the Eagle Ford in Texas, it would be delivering an additional 300,000 barrels of oil per day by now, Brackett says. Instead, production in California is flat.

“We don’t expect a ‘Bakken Boom’ to strike the San Joaquin Valley,” Brackett wrote. “We expect California production to grow only modestly.”

A story in the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was blunt in reaction to the EIA’s optimistic numbers: “Sounds good, until you realize there is no truly successful Monterey resource play to date.”

The promise of fracking in California is based on hope, not data. The danger is a debt-driven explosion of wells (and the chemicals they bring), followed by a bust as production proves disappointing.

5. Water is always a problem in California, a state that lurches from drought to drought and suffers constant bickering between cities, farmers, fishers, and everyone else over the dwindling resource. According to industry figures [PDF], every fracking well uses between 80,000 and 300,000 gallons of water. (That probably means they use way more than that in reality.)

In addition, as Food & Water Watch says in this informative issue brief, “Increasing demand for fresh water, leaking toxic waste pits, well-cementing failures and injection of chemicals underground all post serious short- and long-term water risk.”

Is this how Californians want to use their dwindling water? To expedite the export of dirty oil?

6. Speaking of water, fracking produces a shit-ton of wastewater. It can’t be disposed of in rivers or on the ground (though it very often leaks, accidentally, into both), so instead it’s typically injected far underground, creating the risk of “induced seismicity,” i.e., earthquakes. The link between injection and seismicity in areas with known faults is pretty well-documented at this point. Here’s a paper on it [PDF] in the journal of the American Geophysical Union. There’s also a great article about it in the latest issue of Mother Jones; it isn’t officially online yet, but it looks like you can get a bootleg copy here.

Less is known about injecting into areas with unknown faults, which are all over California. As far as I can tell, there’s been no research at all on deep injection in California specifically. The Mother Jones piece makes pretty clear that the industry is trying to squelch any discussion of this, but don’t worry, they pledge to “avoid known faults.” What could go wrong? (The 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 50 people, originated in an unknown fault. Just saying.)

7. Most people don’t get this, but getting at tight oil requires a lot of wells, because production at each well falls off pretty quickly. There’s not much data from Monterey yet, because there aren’t a lot of horizontal fracking wells yet, but data from other tight oil plays shows that the depletion rate is high, on the order of 80 or 90 percent the first year. Here’s the production profile of a typical well in the Bakken play:

Other tight oil plays have turned up similar results.

Oil companies are not particularly eager for people to know this. When petroleum geologist and researcher Arthur Berman looked at actual well data, it turned out oil and gas companies had systematically overstated shale well productivity:

With wells falling off quickly, and most early fracking funded by debt, producers are under huge pressure to keep digging new wells. Here’s what that looks like, in a graph put together by French petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, taken from yet another Nelder post:

(For reference: kb/d is thousands of barrels per day; b/d/w is barrels per day per well.)

Nelder writes of this graph:

It tells the real story of tight oil production beautifully. Each well produces a mere 150 barrels or so per day on average, and like shale gas wells, their output declines rapidly after initial production. As [Foreign Policy's Steve] LeVine learned from a Bakken executive, the decline rate can be over 90 percent in the first year, then gradually tapers off. After seven or eight years, wells will have produced over 60 percent of their recoverable reserves. Therefore, you have to keep drilling like hell just to maintain production, and drill even more to increase it. … But at around $7 million per well, these wells are not cheap.

Given the steep decline rates of typical fracking wells, making the thick, hard-to-reach Monterey Shale oil pay off like oil companies want it to pay off — like they’re promising California officials it will pay off — means constantly drilling a swarm of new wells.

Meanwhile, four of California’s top 10 agricultural counties are in frack-targeted areas, which is why agricultural groups are starting to ally with greens against it. Then there are the threatened wells in the Baldwin Hills oil field near Culver City, where oil drilling has already had devastating effects on (largely poor) residents. The local impacts from these wells are no joke, and there are going to be a lot of them.

8. Can Californians trust their government to properly regulate fracking? (That’s what a lot of the borderline somnolent green groups seem to think.) The fracking that has gone on in the state so far seem to have flown completely under the radar of state regulators. Get this, from the L.A. Times:

This new interest in fracking plainly caught California regulators off guard. In January 2011, [state Sen. Fran] Pavley wrote to the state division of oil, gas and geothermal resources, or DOGGR (pronounced “dogger”), asking for information [PDF] about the number and location of fracked wells in the state, the amount of water employed, the permitting process and what was known about the risk to groundwater.

The agency responded with a detailed four-page letter, the gist of which was: “We don’t know nothin’.” Its actual words were: “The Division is unable to identify where and how often hydraulic fracturing occurs within the state.” It also said that “the Division has not yet developed regulations to address this activity.”

So, DOGGR doesn’t know where the fracking is, or how much there is, and it hasn’t bothered to develop any regulations to address it. But now, the agency insists it’s changing. It’s on top of things. This DOGGR. So … yeah. No worries, Californians. You’re in good hands!

9. That USC study about the economic effects of fracking I mentioned up top? DeSmogBlog did a little sniffing around and found oily fingerprints all over it. It was funded by, written by, and reviewed by people with longstanding ties to the industry. California officials might do well to take it with several grains of salt.

10. It is morally wrong to sacrifice the interests of poor people and future generations for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and shareholders. Kinda seems like this one should go without saying, but …

I guess that’s enough for now. If activists rally against California oil fracking, they’ll get the same lectures from VSPs that the Keystone campaign gets: “This one bit of supply won’t make any difference to climate change; as long as demand exists, they’ll get it out somehow; you’re distracting from the carbon tax pony.” But whatever. It’s time for states and oil producers to get the message that moving heaven and earth to reach the world’s filthiest fossil fuels is no longer socially acceptable.

Every junkie needs an intervention.

——
* So, as promised, for you hardcore nerds, more on why the 15 billion number is almost certainly wrong, and most likely high:

Here’s a handy chart that I’m going to steal from this piece in Oil & Gas Journal, because it’s behind a paywall:

First, we’re looking in the “Monterey” column, over on the right. Note that it estimates 500 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), which represents the sum total of the oil in the ground. This not based on well data — remember, it hasn’t been fracked much — but on mathematical simulations. Such simulations offer a range of possibilities with different probabilities; it’s likely 500 billion was the mid-point probability. Suffice to say, that’s a highly speculative number.

Next, we’re looking at the “recovery factor” (RF), which is the percentage of the total oil that can technically be recovered — not economically recovered, but recovered with today’s technology, irrespective of price. This chart estimates 2.8 percent, which seems optimistic. The Elm Coulee play in Montana is a “sweet spot,” with comparatively shallow, easy to reach oil; the more common RF for big shale plays is between 1 and 2 percent. The Monterey play faces determined environmental opposition and some unfavorable geography. Once they get in and start drilling, the RF could well fall. It too is speculative.

Anyway, multiply the OOIP by the RF and you get the “estimated ultimately recoverable” (EUR) oil — the amount we might conceivably be able to get out.

OOIP x RF = EUR! Fun.

So in the case of Monterey, 500 billion barrels times 2.8 percent equals 14 billion barrels. That’s the estimate of technically recoverable oil. (The EIA pegs EUR at 15.4 billion barrels, which is what gets used in all the news stories. Not sure why this data set and the EIA differ by a bit — probably a different OOIP or RF estimate — but it’s not that important.)

That’s two speculative numbers multiplied. What if the RF turns out to be 1.4 percent, like in the Niobrara Shale? Well then there’s half as much recoverable oil in Monterey: 7 billion barrels. Fifteen billion barrels would satisfy U.S. oil demand for just over two years; 7 billion would satisfy it for a year or so.

Regardless: the 15 billion barrels figure that gets tossed around confidently by journalists is just this side of a guess, and probably a guess on the high side.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics

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Recently, a friend of mine raised the kind of question that stops you in your tracks, opens your eyes, and makes you take a good, hard look at life as you know it — a question that poses a fundamental challenge to values that date all the way back to childhood. Namely: How often do you really need to wash your clothes?

She was specifically concerned about her 2-year-old’s seemingly sparkly clean T-shirts. “There are days when his entire outfit is spotless,” she mused. “I feel weird putting it in the washer, but then I wonder if I’m being a negligent mom.”

Huh. Before this illuminating question, I confess I hadn’t really thought about it. Of course you wash most of your stuff after wearing it, right? Otherwise it’s gross … right? Dirty? I mean, “the great unwashed” is not a compliment.

But then again, who says I do need to launder my 1995 No Doubt Tragic Kingdom tour T-shirt after just one afternoon sitting at a desk? Could some kind of detergent mafia be operating in the shadows of my laundry room right this minute?

If I’ve learned anything as the Greenie Pig, it’s that assumptions — that you need shampoo, say, or that there’s something wrong with enjoying a donut straight from the trash — should always be challenged. So I set out to find out just how many wearings my apparel could stand, and, by proxy, how much water and energy I could save by delaying the spin cycle.

First, a quick look at my baseline. Like most people I know, I typically wash my jeans every four to five wears, a practice endorsed by many textile experts (a Levi Strauss guru actually recommends hardly ever washing jeans). Skirts and sweaters usually go two or three wears between washings, too, with my standards for cleanliness inversely proportional with how fussy the item is to clean. (Hand-wash only? Smells fine to me!) PJs sometimes carry me all the way from one episode of Downton Abbey to another. If I’ve only worn a shirt for a few hours, I’ll occasionally refold it for another go — but sometimes, out of habit more than anything else, I’ll even toss those in the hamper. Socks, undies, workout clothes, and anything stained or crusted with mud gets priority boarding to the washing machine.

My criteria for this less-laundry challenge were nonscientific and simple: Does the item smell? Does it look bad? No? OK, back in the closet. I instructed my boyfriend, Ted, to alert me immediately if I missed anything, and went on my way. Over the ensuing weeks, I received exactly zero wrinkled noses, and even a couple of bashful confessions from friends. “I wear my wool socks at least three times between washings,” said one. “Just let ‘em air out a bit.”

Here are my limits after a couple of weeks:

• Jeans: Still ready for a dip after about five wearings.

• Sweaters: Five or six wearings if I’ve worn an underlayer with them; two or three if not.

• PJs: Made it 1.5 weeks between washes with no noticeable side effects.

• Next-to-skin shirts: Two full-day wearings if I haven’t been actively sweating in them (and they don’t have a visible deodorant slick); one if I have.

• Socks: Three wearings for naturally antimicrobial merino wool socks, one for cotton.

• Outdoor clothing: Three or four uses for merino wool stuff or outer layers, like ski pants.

• Unmentionables: I can’t bring myself to double-dip on these. One use only.

And the environmental payoff for all this re-wearing? Modest, but nothing to sneeze at. The practice has increased my time between laundry loads to about a week and a half, compared to one week beforehand (all those unmentionables and sweaty workout gear add up). That translates to about three loads per month, rather than four. And that translates to 36 loads a year, down from 48 loads, which in turn translates to a savings of 180 gallons of water and 63.6 pounds of carbon every year.* Not too bad for a habit that actually lightens your chore load.

Still, my friend’s original question kept coming back to me: Would she be a “bad mom” if she diverted her tot’s clean-looking duds from the hamper? After all, exposing your kid to excess bacteria, viruses, and general body funk is grounds for admission to the Bad Moms Club (See BMC Charter, Section 11). And that goes for the rest of us, too: Does skipping a wash or two turn us into walking plague factories?

I did a little research on this, and oh man, was I disturbed. Apparently, our wardrobes are crawling with gross stuff: body oils! Dead skin cells! Mold! Bacteria! Viruses! In even worse news, one microbiologist was even quoted on Fox News saying the average load of laundry contains an 1/10 of an ounce of feces. (No word on who these people are and whether they have a religious opposition to toilet paper.)

For some, washing your clothes every time isn’t nearly enough. The U.K.’s slightly hysterical Hygiene Council [PDF] urges us to also wash all our clothes in hot water (140 degrees F and up), never mind that cold-water washes have been a staple of the energy-conscious crowd for years. And the Daily Mail would have us using bleach on every load and running a segregated cycle just for underwear. Otherwise … (insert skull and crossbones here).

The situation appears less dire on this side of the pond. The CDC’s website assures us that hot water isn’t necessary for every load, nor is bleach. And Real Simple magazine’s “When-to-Wash-It Handbook” touts guidelines fairly similar to my limits (with the exception of my PJs. Apparently I am disgusting in this regard, and need to be refreshing them every four wearings).

Look, I get it — if someone in the house is sick, or has allergies, or a compromised immune system — wash-every-wear could be the ticket. In hot water, even. But I’ve washed clothes in cold water for years, and my household has a better-than-average health record. And over the past few weeks of less-frequent laundering, I’ve experienced no extra skin irritations, general infections, or projectile diarrhea. I’m sticking with my multi-wear, cold-water-wash habits for now.

How about you? What are your limits? C’mon, air your dirty laundry.

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