Locator: 50910MONTEREY.
Query: what's going on with California's Monterey Shale?
Reply: dead, dormant, dismissed --
***************************
Cottage Pudding Recipe
This looks suspiciously what my mother used to called cottage pudding, though she topped with a wonderful treacly syrup.
See recipe at this post.
Occidental Petroleum made a sweet deal on November 30, a masterpiece of Wall Street engineering. And just about every investor that touched it is now getting their hands burned off.
That day, Oxy spun off California Resources. It held Oxy’s oil-and-gas exploration-and-production assets in California. It’s the state’s largest natural gas producer and its largest oil-and-gas acreage holder with operations in the basins of Los Angeles, San Joaquin, Ventura, and Sacramento.
Oxy was the big player in the miraculous scam of the Monterey Shale formation in California, which had been hyped for years as the largest reserves of oil in the US. Any studies that showed that this oil wasn’t recoverable with [current] technologies due to the geological mess underground in earthquake land were shunted aside.
The EIA finally conceded that point in May 2014 and slashed the delusional estimates of the reserves by 96%. California isn’t exactly the easiest place for fracking in the US. When the EIA finally acknowledged reality, Oxy was the biggest loser.Much, much more at the article.
Occidental Petroleum Corporationannounced today that its Board of Directors has approved the spin-off of its California oil and gas business into an independent and separately traded company, California Resources Corporation.
The companies will be separated through the distribution of approximately 80.1 percent of the outstanding shares of California Resources to holders of Occidental common stock. Subject to the satisfaction of the conditions to the spin-off, the distribution is expected to occur on November 30, 2014. Occidental shareholders will receive 0.4 shares of California Resources common stock for every one share of Occidental common stock held at the close of business November 17, 2014, the record date for the distribution.Comments are important.
A bustling city is sprouting on five acres here, carved out of a vast almond grove. Tanker trucks and heavy equipment come and go, a row of office trailers runs the length of the site and an imposing 150-foot drilling rig illuminated by football-field-like lights rises over the trees.To me, the activity sounds like Texas or ND-maybe our "Shale is a Bubble" people have written off the Monterey Shale too soon.
It's all been hustled into service to solve a tantalizing riddle: how to tap into the largest oil shale reservoir in the United States.
Across the southern San Joaquin Valley, oil exploration sites have popped up in agricultural fields and on government land, driven by the hope that technological advances in oil extraction — primarily hydraulic fracturing and acidization — can help provide access to deep and lucrative oil reserves.
The Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money.
The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall's congressional elections.
Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan a "bailout" for insurance companies providing coverage under the healthcare law.
They continue to argue that most insurers shouldn't need to substantially increase premiums because safeguards in the healthcare law will protect them over the next several years. [most .... shouldn't .... need .... substantially ... increase: parsing that sentence will provide fodder for pundits for months]
But the change in regulations essentially provides insurers with another backup: If they keep rate increases modest over the next couple of years but lose money, the administration will tap federal funds as needed to cover shortfalls.
Although little noticed so far, the plan was already beginning to fuel a new round of attacks Tuesday from the healthcare law's critics.
"If conservatives want to stop the illegal Obamacare insurance bailout before it starts they must start planning now," wrote Conn Carroll, an editor of the right-leaning news site Townhall.com.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee began circulating a memo on the issue and urging colleagues to fight what they are calling "another end-run around Congress."
Obama administration officials said the new regulations would not put taxpayers at risk.
"We are confident this three-year program will not create a shortfall," Health and Human Services spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt said in a statement. "However, we want to be clear that in the highly unlikely event of a shortfall, HHS will use appropriations as available to fill it."What this means: in the competitive world of health care insurance, insurers will low-ball premiums to attract customers knowing that the government is now liable for losses. And the losses are open-ended. Blank check. Even some of the 47% who would never vote for Romney can figure this out.
Early evidence suggests that emergency rooms have become busier since the Affordable Care Act expanded insurance coverage this year, despite the law's goal of reducing unnecessary care in ERs.
Almost half of ER doctors say they are seeing more patients since key provisions of the health law took effect January 1, 2014, while more than a quarter say their patient volume has remained the same, according to a survey to be released Wednesday by the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Eighty-six percent of emergency doctors expect visits to rise over the next three years, though the email survey didn't ask the doctors why. Democrats who designed the 2010 health law hoped it would do the opposite. They wanted to give the uninsured better access to primary-care doctors who could treat routine ailments and prevent chronic disease, with the intent of keeping patients out of the ER and lowering the cost of care.
The median ER charge was more than $1,200 for the most frequent outpatient diagnoses in a study of over 8,000 ER visits in 2006-08, said a 2013 report funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.
Federal energy authorities have slashed by 96% the estimated amount of recoverable oil buried in California's vast Monterey Shale deposits, deflating its potential as a national "black gold mine" of petroleum.
Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once thought recoverable from the jumbled layers of subterranean rock spread across much of Central California, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.
The new estimate, expected to be released publicly next month, is a blow to the nation's oil future and to projections that an oil boom would bring as many as 2.8 million new jobs to California and boost tax revenue by $24.6 billion annually.
The Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the nation's shale oil reserves. It had been seen as an enormous bonanza, reducing the nation's need for foreign oil imports through the use of the latest in extraction techniques, including acid treatments, horizontal drilling and fracking.
The energy agency said the earlier estimate of recoverable oil, issued in 2011 by an independent firm under contract with the government, broadly assumed that deposits in the Monterey Shale formation were as easily recoverable as those found in shale formations elsewhere.If 96% is taken off the table, it's hard worth going after the other 4%. The headline should have been: California takes full loss on Monterey Shale. This has huge implications for the Bakken, the Eagle Ford, and the Permian.
April 20, 2021: see this post --
The Miocene: I had seen this story earlier but it didn't interest me enough to post it. Then a reader sent it to me this morning and I saw something in the article I had not seen before. The BP discovery in the Gulf of Mexico is in a very "recent" geologic reservoir, the Miocene. How recent: it was during the Miocene that apes and humans were diverging.
It is generally agreed that the taproot of the human family shrub is to be found among apelike species of the middle Miocene epoch, roughly 15 mya or the late Miodene epoch, roughly 10 mya. -- Britannica.
Links to come back to when I have time:
- Mad Dog field -- see this post at the blog, April 19, 2013;
- the Miocene Monterey formation, GEO Ex Pro, 2013;
- the Monterey Formation, wiki;
February 20, 2017: Monterey County voters overwhelmingly voted to ban fracking in their county. If I recall correctly, there's very little drillingin Monterey County to begin with; this is not a big story. And the fact that USGS has knocked off 96% of reserves. See April 30, 2015, RBN Energy link below.
September 20, 2015: Business Insider calls it a scam.
June 17, 2015: hope springs eternal.
April 30, 2015: incredibly good update, RBN Energy.
January 25, 2015: hope springs eternal. The San Jose Mercury News is reporting:
The oil and gas potential of the vast Monterey shale formation will be the focus of an upcoming study by an independent panel of scientists operating under direction of the state Legislature.
The study will be part of a highly anticipated report on the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, with the first volume released last week. That report, covering existing well-stimulation practices, underscored the profound uncertainties about the amount of developable oil beneath Monterey County and parts south.
"We're going to look at what it would really take to get a good estimate," said Jane Long, who is spearheading the study for the California Council on Science and Technology.
The effort is one result of SB 4, a 2013 state bill that was the Legislature's answer to a raging debate about the impacts of hydraulic fracking in California. Santa Cruz County banned fracking, and in November, San Benito County voters did the same.
The Monterey shale underlies the San Joaquin Valley and parts of Monterey County. In 2011, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated it held 15.4 billion barrels of untapped oil -- more than any place in the U.S.
But in 2014, the agency dramatically lowered its estimate to 600,000 million barrels. The study found both estimates to be unreliable.Say what? They found "both estimates to be unreliable."
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) has cut its estimate of recoverable oil in California's Monterey Shale to 600 million bbl, a 96% decrease from previous estimates, an agency spokesman told NGI's Shale Daily Wednesday.
The revised number comes nearly three years after EIA had estimated Lower 48 technically recoverable shale oil resources at 23.9 billion bbl, including 15.4 billion bbl in the Monterey/Santos play, then believed to be the nation's largest shale oil formation (see Shale Daily, July 11, 2011). A year later, in its Annual Energy Outlook 2013 (AEO2013), the agency estimated technically recoverable oil in the Monterey at 13.7 billion bbl (see Shale Daily, July 24, 2012).
But changes to technically recoverable resources (TRR) estimates "do not necessarily have significant implications for projected oil and natural gas production, which are heavily influenced by economic considerations that do not enter into the estimation of TRR," an EIA spokesman told NGI.
"Importantly, projected oil production from the Monterey play is not a material part of the U.S. oil production outlook in either AEO2013 or AEO2014, and was largely unaffected by the change in TRR estimates between the 2013 and 2014 editions of the AEO," Jonathan Cogan said. "EIA estimates U.S. total crude oil production averaged 8.3 million b/d in April 2014.
“In the Annual Energy Outlook 2014 (AEO2014) Reference case, production of economically recoverable oil from the Monterey averaged 57,000 b/d between 2010 and 2040, and in the AEO2013 the same production averaged 14,000 b/d. Clearly, there is not a proportional relationship between TRR and production estimates -- economics matters, and the Monterey play faced significant economic challenges regardless of the TRR estimate."
Estimates of TRR "are highly uncertain," Cogan said.
Key factors driving the lower estimate included new geology information from a U.S. Geological Survey review of the Monterey "and a lack of production growth relative to other shale plays like the Bakken and Eagle Ford."
Except for a footnote, the EIA never mentions the Monterey Shale in the AEO2014. Very, very strange.The TRR estimates and other assumptions in AEO2014 are due to be released by EIA in June.
The field, a formation of rock known as the Monterey Shale, was thought to have 15 billion barrels of “technically recoverable” reserves, according to government estimates. That’s triple the amount of oil found in huge and newly prolific fields in North Dakota and Texas. The formation lies under the San Joaquin Valley in central California. Most of the locations probed so far have been northwest of Bakersfield.Interesting, huh?
But drillers haven’t been able to get the Monterey Shale to produce oil at high rates. 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.
Underground Energy Corp., Santa Barbara, Calif., will attempt to complete the Monterey shale at the Chamberlin 3-2 well on the 7,750-acre Chamberlin lease in its Zaca field extension project in Santa Barbara County, Calif.Some data points: