LA Times: California is believed to have more than 15 billion barrels of oil locked within the rocks under the Central Valley that might be used to feed the nation's energy hunger -- if oil companies can free it with hydraulic fracturing. Fracking, as the practice is popularly called, has been going on in the state for years, but mostly in a remote oil field in Kern County. The prospect of extensive new fracking efforts in the 1,750-square-mile geological formation known as the Monterey Shale, which extends...