Has California’s Fracking Boom Already Gone Bust?
We accelerate down the runway — a tiny asphalt strip next to Taft Skydiving. Our little Piper Cherokee lifts off and as we ascend, I peer out the window.
Below us is California’s Kern County and more than a century of oil exploration — from the gushers of the 1800s to today’s less robust reality. It’s a spider web of dirt roads, drilling rigs, pump jacks, pipes and boilers.
At least I’m pretty sure that’s what’s below us. The air quality is so bad that the San Joaquin Valley we’re flying over looks like the blurred work of an impressionist painter. Our view is smudged by stubborn smog that’s refused to budge for days.
It’s a perfect metaphor for trying to understand the future of oil and gas production in California, which is why we’ve taken flight in the first place.
For years, the biggest talk in California’s energy industry has been about hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) and whether or not the method of pumping sand, chemicals and water at very high pressure to release trapped hydrocarbons will kick off a boom comparable to surging North Dakota.
There was a time, just a few years ago, that most news reports deemed a shale oil boom inevitable in California. But now, it’s not looking like such a sure thing after all.
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