Rarely do accounts offer stark statistics that illustrate just how big the boom has been. Thankfully, a new American Enterprise Institute analysis does so in dramatic fashion.

In a dozen years, North Dakota went from being one of the nation’s poorest states, grouped with some Southern states, New Mexico and West Virginia, to one of the richest, trailing only another energy giant — Alaska. That’s a pretty stunning success story — comparable to Japan’s and West Germany’s delayed post-World War II rebound in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to South Korea’s emergence in the last 20 years as a nation that’s wealthier than most of Europe.

Here are the details from AEI:

“In 2000, North Dakota was the 8th least economically prosperous US states, ranking No. 43 in the country for per-capita real GDP that year … with GDP per person ($35,738) that was more than 20% below the national average ($44,808). In that year, North Dakota was a relatively minor oil-producing state, ranking ninth among the US states for oil production … .

“Starting around 2007, private oil drillers started successfully drilling for shale oil in North Dakota, thanks to advances in drilling and extraction technologies that allowed ‘petropreneurs’ to finally tap into oceans of previously inaccessible unconventional oil in the Bakken oil fields in the western part of the state. … In just the three years between 2007 and 2010, North Dakota moved up 18 places in state rankings for per-capita real GDP, from No. 30 in 2007 to No. 12 in 2010. …

“After more than doubling from 2007 to 2010, annual oil production in the Peace Garden State more than doubled again in the two-year period from 2010 to 2012 … North Dakota was producing so much shale oil in the Bakken that it surpassed both Alaska and California to become the nation’s second-largest oil-producing state in 2012, behind only Texas. … by 2012, the energy-driven stimulus to the state’s economy moved North Dakota to the No. 2 spot in the country for per-capita real GDP at $64,871 behind only Alaska at $72,281, and 33.6% above the national average of $48,567. 

“In 2013, for the second year in a row, North Dakota again ranked No. 2 among US states for real GDP per capita at $68,804 … more than 40% above the national average.”

California could enjoy a similar miracle

The AEI number-crunching bears huge relevance to California, where the Monterey Shale’s oil reserves in the Central Valley and central Pacific coastal counties are believed to be several times as big as those in the Bakken Shale.

Federal energy officials have recently been more downbeat on California’s chances of accessing those reserves than they used to be, allegedly because of new concerns about geologic obstacles that they didn’t used to have. This doesn’t make sense — energy companies are better than ever at overcoming such obstacles. But it wasn’t all that surprising, given how often green bureaucrats pursue their own agendas.

Unsurprisingly, Occidental and other oil energy-exploration firms are far less apprehensive and continue to show great interest in expanding fracking of California’s shale. In its reports to shareholders — reports that Occidental must answer to the SEC for if they are judged deceptive — the energy company has estimated that California has more than 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil in its shale.

That’s more than twice as much as the rest of the U.S. combined. That’s 30 percent higher than the highest federal estimate before officials suddenly began to see geologic obstacles they hadn’t before.

2.8 million new CA jobs. Repeat: 2.8 million new CA jobs

That translates into a ton of money, to put it modestly. If anti-fossil fuel religious crusaders could be overcome, what might that mean for California? The USC report from March 2013 still seems like a good guide.

“Development of oil-shale deposits through Central California using fracking and other techniques may boost the state’s economic activity by as much as 14.3 percent, a University of Southern California study said.

“Such drilling in the Monterey Shale Formation, in addition to increasing per-capita gross domestic product, may add as much as $24.6 billion in state and local tax revenue and as many as 2.8 million jobs by 2020, according to the report … .”

Those numbers seemed outlandish to some folks when they came out 16 months ago. If you look at the AEI’s report on North Dakota, they don’t seem outlandish at all.

“The biggest onshore story is the potential of the Monterey Formation (also known as the Monterey Shale), a zone of petroleum-rich rock that extends much of the state’s length. The Monterey holds an enormous amount of oil, estimated at up to 500 billion barrels. Though it has long been difficult to extract oil directly from it, advancing technology, along with rising oil prices, has put much more of its oil within reach. If even a small fraction of its reserves proves accessible, the Monterey would be the biggest shale oil play in the nation. In July 2011, the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that the Monterey had 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable crude—four times what’s estimated to lie within the Bakken shale formation, which is fueling North Dakota’s current oil boom. Those 15.4 billion barrels would be worth about $1.5 trillion at today’s crude prices.

“The potential impact of 15.4 billion barrels of oil is enormous. Even if California managed to tap just half of that quantity over the next 35 years, the state would be adding an average of 220 million barrels a year—doubling its current output and matching its peak year of 1985. It would also be pumping $22 billion each year into its economy if crude prices stayed near their current levels (in light of global demand, it’s more likely that prices will rise). If the EIA estimate is reasonably close to the mark, the Monterey Formation would be in a class with oil fields in Saudi Arabia.”

Since then, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation that sets the framework for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to be expanded in California to access this huge resource. But this has triggered a backlash from his fellow Democrats, and there are signs everywhere that a multifront legal war will be mounted on all aspects of any plan to sharply increase energy exploration in California, whether it involves fracking or not. The president, at least ostensibly, declares his support for an “all of the above” approach to creating additional energy for America. Not California liberals.

No better option for middle-class job growth

Too bad. Allowing California’s natural resources to be developed could trigger a massive boom in middle-class energy-exploration jobs — which don’t necessarily require college degrees.

Joel Kotkin, the wonderful Los Angeles writer and futurist, took a road trip to Fargo, North Dakota, to see how fracking and other economic initiatives had transformed the remote state:

“North Dakota leads the nation in virtually every indicator of prosperity: the lowest unemployment rate, and the highest rates of net in-migration, income growth and job creation. Last year North Dakota wages rose a remarkable 8.9%, twice as much as Utah and Texas, which shared honors for second place, and many times the 1% rise experienced nationwide.”

Fargo isn’t in the drilling area, as Kotkin notes, and owes its transformation to many factors. But the old JFK line about a rising tide (economy) lifting all ships certainly holds for North Dakota in general. California could benefit immensely from the same economic multiplier — at least if it can overcome the green religionists and their trial-lawyer buddies.

By Chris Reed

Bloomberg News, which is doing an increasingly good job covering California of late, had an important article Wednesday about likely problems in developing the Golden State’s massive shale reserves. Those reserves could transform the state’s economy, according to a University of Southern California study that said drilling for the energy reserves could generate as many as 2.8 million jobs and $24.6 billion in state and local tax revenue by 2020.

Why was it important? Because its downbeat tone mostly didn’t come from the expected sources: the green cultists who hate fossil fuel and who constantly dispense lies about hydraulic fracturing, the improved drilling process behind the brown energy revolution in the Dakotas, Montana, East Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The skepticism instead came from credible people.

From Wall Street:

“’The Monterey shale was supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but so far has not lived up to the hype,’ Fadel Gheit, an oil and gas analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York, said in a telephone interview. ‘It’s not conclusive that the emperor has no clothes. So far, it has not shown any big sign that this is going to be another Bakken or Eagle Ford.'”

From Chevron:

“’Based on our drilling results, our view is that the oil has migrated out of the formation and is now found in pockets outside of the Monterey shale,’ said Kurt Glaubitz, a spokesman for San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp. (CVX), the second-biggest U.S. oil producer. ‘We don’t believe it’s going to compete for our investment. We have other opportunities that are more economical for us to develop.’”

And from a scientist who explained what’s behind the skepticism:

“The Monterey shale is more expensive to explore than the Bakken shale that’s yielded an oil boom in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford shale in Texas, said Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis.

“’The Eagle Ford is like a pound cake,’ Jaffe said in a telephone interview. ‘The Monterey shale is like a nine-layer chocolate cake and to get all the layers straightened up and put in all the frosting every place we wanted — that’s going to be more complicated and it takes more skill.'”

Betting — and betting big — that the skeptics are wrong

But the company that’s got the most invested in drilling the Monterey shale is far more confident than the skeptics. As I wrote in November, Occidental Petroleum Corp., the Los Angeles-based energy giant, “estimates the shale reserves on California land it already controls to have over 20 billion barrels of potential oil –- a claim that the company says is made in accordance with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rule that only ‘economically producible’ reserves can be cited in SEC filings.”

That last point is not a small one at all. Energy companies have a history of being cautious in their stock prospectuses and in representations to shareholders and regulators. Oxy has been eying the Monterey shale for a long time and believes it is up to the challenge.

And the context is crucial to remember here. It wasn’t long ago that the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations were considered impossible to develop. But then along came the information-technology revolution. The reason hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is so much more efficient than it used to be doesn’t have to do with crude factors. It’s not the drillers using more powerful streams of water or larger water cannons to fracture rock underground. Instead, IT now allows drillers to use the equivalent of MRIs of vast swaths of underground areas, and to use this information to know where to precisely aim their water cannons.

NYT: ‘New Technologies Redraw the World’s Energy Picture’

And hydraulic fracturing is getting more refined and more efficient with every year. So if Occidental believes it can access California’s Monterey shale, it has good reason to be optimistic.

The question, alas, remains whether California’s political class will allow fracking’s magic in the Golden State. Even as fracking increasingly gives the U.S. a huge competitive advantage over Europe — detailed here — the environmentalists who dominate the state Democratic Party continue to pretend the brown energy revolution isn’t happening.

Perhaps they should read The New York Times.