Fracking the US – Monterey Shale’s 96% downgrade blows the scam
Dylan Murphy & Jo Muphy
19th June 2014
The US’s drive to become a top global oil and gas exporter by fracking has been blown wide open by a 96% write-down of California’s Monterey Shale – meant to hold two thirds of the US’s shale oil. How long before the whole enterprise is exposed as a monstrous Ponzi scheme? But the myth of American energy independence from fracking has been dealt a huge blow by the downgrade of recoverable oil from the Monterey Shale formation.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has slashed its estimate of oil reserves from the Monterey shale formation by a massive 96%.
This field was meant to contain 64% of US shale oil
In 2011 the EIA released a report that reviewed US shale oil and gas reserves. It stated that the largest shale oil formation in America was the Monterey play in Southern California. The report estimated that the Monterey Shale formation held 15.5 billion barrels of oil or 64% of total US shale oil reserves.