{"id":57970,"date":"2013-08-11T20:26:46","date_gmt":"2013-08-11T19:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/are-we-trading-our-health-for-oil-in-new-fracking-induced-california-gold-rush-with-slideshow\/57970\/"},"modified":"2013-08-11T23:31:16","modified_gmt":"2013-08-11T22:31:16","slug":"are-we-trading-our-health-for-oil-in-new-fracking-induced-california-gold-rush-with-slideshow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/are-we-trading-our-health-for-oil-in-new-fracking-induced-california-gold-rush-with-slideshow\/","title":{"rendered":"Are We Trading Our Health For Oil in New, Fracking-Induced California Gold Rush?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: This article was produced as a project for the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships <\/span><\/a>, a program of USC’s\u00a0<\/em>Annenberg School for Communcation & Journalism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Beneath the farms, orchards and vineyards of Central and Southern California lies a prehistoric soup worth a fortune. The mineral-rich Monterey and Santos shale formations stretching 1,750 square miles across the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles Basin hold a watery mixture of oil and gas \u2014 but it\u2019s the oil that may trigger another gold rush. That is, if companies can figure out a profitable\u00a0<\/a>way to tap it.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that the contiguous 48 states hold an estimated 23.9 billion barrels of recoverable oil, of which an astounding 15 billion barrels are in the Monterey\/Santos formations. California has been plumbed for oil extraction and production for 150 years, but getting to the Monterey\u2019s mother lode is no easy task.<\/p>\n

\u201cProducing Monterey Shale oil could make panning for gold look easy,\u201d wrote<\/a> David Brown in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists\u2019 publication The Explorer<\/em>. The formation is fractured and faulted. But that\u2019s not all. The shale is, on average, almost 1,900 feet thick and 11,200 feet deep. This makes accessing the oil tricky, and conventional methods won\u2019t suffice.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, companies are turning to new technologies. In California they\u2019ve tried using water and steam flooding, gravel packing, and acidization (injecting\u00a0hydrochloric or hydrofluoric acid) to coax the oil to the surface. And then there is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, where a mixture of chemicals, water and sand are forced at high pressure underground vertically, and sometimes horizontally as well.<\/p>\n

It has only been in recent years that high-volume hydraulic fracturing and horizontal fracking have become common in oil and gasfields. On the East coast, companies are primarily fracking for gas, but in California it\u2019s the oil they\u2019re after. (Gas is a byproduct that is typically burned off.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is new, and potentially alarming, are projections of dramatically increased fracking activity in California brought on by the availability of new techniques,\u201d wrote Michael Kiparsky and Jayni Foley Hein in a report<\/a>, \u201cRegulation of Hydraulic Fracturing in California: A Wastewater and Water Quality Perspective,\u201d from the University of California-Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch developments have outstripped the ability of responsible agencies to effectively oversee fracking activity,\u201d the report states. \u201cThis topic is important in part because fracking has long-term implications: once fracking has been conducted, its effects may be impossible to reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Click the image below to view the slideshow)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Fracking has led to an oil rush in states like North Dakota and Texas and a gas rush on the East Coast in the Marcellus Shale<\/a>, but fracking and increased drilling activity have come with reports of pollution to air and water, as well as risks to public and environmental health. And that has many in California concerned.<\/p>\n

Republished from: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beneath the farms, orchards and vineyards of Central and Southern California lies a prehistoric soup worth a fortune. The mineral-rich Monterey and Santos shale formations stretching 1,750 square miles across the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles Basin hold a watery mixture of oil and gas \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the oil that may trigger another gold rush. That is, if companies can figure out a profitable way to tap it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57971,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-57970","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}