California’s Newsom orders end of fracking in emissions push

Bloomberg

Californian Governor Gavin Newsom will ban new hydraulic fracturing permits in the coming years as the state pushes to eliminate net greenhouse-gas emissions by 2045.
His order to halt new permits by January 2024 follows calls from environmental groups for executive action after two Democratic state senators failed to pass legislation that would prohibit fracking altogether in 2023. The bill aimed to protect communities that are most impacted by the oil production technique, which involves blasting a mix of water, sand and chemicals underground to unleash oil from shale rock.
California has shuttered a massive amount of natural gas-fired power generation in recent years, and in September Newsom announced a ban on sales of new gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035. The fracking ban is less consequential for the broader fossil fuel industry because the practice accounts for only a fraction of the state’s crude output.
In 2014 and 2014, less than 1% of about 83,500 producing oil and gas wells in California were fracked, according to a 2016 report from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.
California’s oil production has declined steadily since 1985 and currently represents less than 4% of the nation’s output, according to the Energy Information Administration. Widely employed from Texas to North Dakota, fracking has turned the US into the world’s largest crude producer.