WSJ: Advice to California -- Take a Fact-Finding Trip to The Bakken

Link here to the WSJ. Generally a subscription is required, but this seems to work without a subscription. A big "thank you" to Dave for alerting me to the article.

The byline is Williston, North Dakota, suggesting the staff reporter filed the story from the Bakken.

Williston, N.D.
 
In his speech last week responding to high gas prices, President Barack Obama insisted that "we can't just drill our way out of" our energy woes. Actually, we can—and if the president wants proof, he should travel to boomtown USA: Williston, North Dakota.

Williston sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output. This once-sleepy town is what the Gold Rush might have looked like had it happened in the time of McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Home Depot.

And the oil rush is making Dakotans rich in a hurry, with farmers and other landowners becoming overnight millionaires from lucrative royalties and leases. One retired farmer tells me that, thanks to oil rigs churning on his property, he suddenly has a net worth north of $30 million.

But the article is about much more than individual Dakotans. It's important for all Americans, in general, and Californians, specifically:

Now contrast this bonanza with what's going on in another energy-rich state: California. While North Dakota's oil production has tripled since 2007 (to more than 150 million barrels in 2011), the Golden State'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 million [sic: should be "billion" -- see 1st comment] barrels of recoverable oil from the Bakken, it estimated closer to 15 million [sic: should be "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.

Great article.