Taft, CA - OK - how bad is it?

[SportyandMisty]

Originally Posted by .highnlite

Why disagree with a fact. Disagreeing with an opinion is fine, but a fact? ...

I must agree - it is silly to disagree with a fact.

Speaking of facts, here are a few relevant ones:

While North Dakota's oil production has tripled since 2007 (to more than 150 million barrels in 2011), California's oil production has fallen by a third in the past 20 years, to 201 million barrels last year from 320 million in 1990. The problem isn't that California is running out of oil: In 2008, when the USGS estimated four billion barrels of recoverable oil from North Dakota's Bakken, it estimated closer to 15 billion barrels in California's vast Monterey Shale.

Rather, California's problem is politicians—at the behest of their green-energy allies—deciding to wall off the state from developing evil fossil fuels. With its prohibitive environmental regulations, state cap-and-trade law, costly renewable energy mandates and 40 years of prohibitions on almost all offshore drilling, California ranks worst in the country and 91st in the world in its hostility to drilling, according to the Fraser Institute's 2011 Global Petroleum Survey. This month, according to North Dakota's Department of Mineral Resources, California is no longer America's third-largest energy-producing state—leapfrogged by North Dakota.

[.highnlite]

Kern County Oil production 2002 198,800,000 barrels 37,031 producing wells.

Kern County Oil Production 2009 154,000,000 barrels 42,236 producing wells.

Back to those facts, if the number of wells is up, but production is down, it is due to declining oil reserves, not politicians.

Conservatives like to blame politicians and love to blame Obama, but, interestingly oil production under the current administration is growing rapidly, The US is predicted to be the #1 producer in the world by 2017.

[.highnlite]

...

Meanwhile, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal tells readers that America as a whole could have a jobs boom, just like North Dakota, if only the environmentalists would get out of the way.

The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.

Why the hydrocarbon boom? It’s all about the fracking. The combination of horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing of shale and other low-permeability rocks has opened up large reserves of oil and natural gas to production. As a result, U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past three years, reversing a decline over decades, while natural gas production has exploded.

Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production.