California may be on the cusp of an oil fracking boom along its 1,750-square-mile Monterrey Shale Formation, which is potentially the richest shale oil reserve in the United States.
Earthquakes have disturbed the layers of shale rock that run under most of the western state, making fracking more challenging than in a region like North Dakota. But when the next cyclical El Niño brings the huge amounts of water necessary for fracking, California could experience an economic boom similar to North Dakota’s oil rush.
Breitbart News recently noted that “California Is Greece, but with Capital Gains.” A state with terrific beauty and fabulous tech entrepreneurs, it mimics Greece as a failed experiment in liberalism that has the highest poverty rate in the U.S. at 23.4 percent. California is grossly insolvent over the long term with about $500 billion in debt, but remains alive–on life support–as long as the $12 billion of extra capital gains taxes hit each year.
In response to the state’s three-year drought, Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order implementing California’s first-ever mandatory water restrictions, which require cities and towns to cut their water usage by 25 percent. In doing so, he specifically exempted oil company water use for fracking. Brown hopes that California can be rescued by a fracking economic renaissance, just like the one that lifted North Dakota from the bottom fifth to the second-richest state by per-capita GDP in just one decade.
[…]
