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www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=616
ARTICLE from Cutting Edge, 7-7-08, by Gal Luft
``Kicking Our Oil Addiction
If Iran and Brazil Can Do It, So Can We
When the founding fathers declared our independence, they could not have imagined that, 232 years later, the United States would be so spectacularly dependent on foreign countries. It would be roughly eight more decades before oil gushed from a well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, marking the beginning of the global oil economy; it took eight decades more for the United States to become a net oil importer. But the republic's disastrous dependence on foreign oil has increased by leaps and bounds ever since.
In 1973, when OPEC imposed its oil embargo, U.S. oil imports composed 30 percent of our needs; today, they make up more than 60 percent, with a growing proportion of that crude coming from the world's least stable regions. At around $145 a barrel, the United States, by my calculations, will spend more on imported oil this year than it will spend on its own defense budget, and much of that money will flow into the coffers of those who wish us ill.
Since oil dependence is so unappealing, you'd think that energy independence would be an easy sell, especially on this Fourth of July weekend. But in fact, very few policy ideas have been so ridiculed. A 2007 report by the National Petroleum Council, a privately funded group that offers advice from the oil and gas industries to the federal government, calls energy independence "unrealistic" ...
Is energy independence a pipe dream? Hardly. In the electricity sector, the mission has already been accomplished. Remember President Jimmy Carter in his cardigan during the oil crises of the 1970s, urging Americans to save electricity? It took us just one decade to wean the electricity sector from oil. Today, only 2 percent of U.S. electricity comes from oil, according to the Energy Department.
Could we do something similar with transportation, where American cars and trucks still gulp oil-based fuel greedily? At least four very different countries -- dictatorships and democracies alike -- are already making serious headway toward that goal. It's past time to pay attention to their example.
[Iran]
The first country, surprisingly enough, is Iran. The Islamic republic has lots of crude but little capacity to refine it, leaving Tehran heavily dependent on gasoline imports. The country's blustery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is fully aware that this is Iran's Achilles' heel and worries that a comprehensive gasoline embargo could cause enough social unrest to undermine his regime.
So Ahmadinejad has launched an energy-independence program designed to shift Iran's transportation system from gasoline to natural gas, which Iran has plenty of ...
His plan includes a mandate for domestic automakers to make "dual-fuel" cars that can run on both gasoline and natural gas, a crash program to convert used vehicles to run on natural gas and a program to convert Iranian gas stations to serve both kinds of fuel.
According to the International Association of Natural Gas Vehicles, more than 100 conversion centers have been built throughout the country: Iranians can drive in with their gasoline-only cars, pay a subsidized fee equivalent to $50 and collect their newly dual-fuelled cars several hours later. Ahmadinejad's plan, which has been largely ignored by the West, means that within five years or so, Iran could be virtually immune to international sanctions.
[Brazil]
While Iran is moving quickly toward energy independence, Brazil is already there. It's a striking turnaround; three decades ago, the country imported 80 percent of its oil supply. But since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the Brazilians have invested massively in their sugar-based ethanol industry and created a fleet of vehicles that can run on the resulting fuel. According to the Sugar Cane Industry Union (Unica), 90 percent of the new cars sold this year in Brazil will be flexible-fuel vehicles that cost an extra $100 to make but can run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol.
Lest anyone think that can't be done in the United States, many of those new cars are made by General Motors and Ford. All it really takes to turn a regular car into a flex-fuel one is a fuel sensor and a corrosion-resistant fuel line ...
Its efforts have not only broken the yoke of Brazil's oil dependence but also insulated the country's economy from the pain of the current spike in global oil prices. Gasoline prices have nearly doubled elsewhere since 2005, but in Brazil, they have been almost frozen. This year, more ethanol will be sold in Brazil than gasoline. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
[China]
Like Brazil, China has decided to replace gasoline with alternative fuels. But unlike the United States and Brazil, where the favorite substitute is ethanol, China has embraced a different alcohol: methanol. Several provinces in China already blend their gasoline with methanol, a clear, colorless liquid also known as wood alcohol, and scores of methanol plants are currently under construction there.
The Chinese auto industry has already begun to produce flex-fuel models that can run on methanol. Shanxi, a province in central China that produces much of the country's coal, has even issued stickers granting cars that use pure methanol free passage on the province's toll roads ...
Methanol is cheaper [than ethanol] and far easier to produce in bulk. While ethanol can be made only from agricultural products such as corn and sugar cane, methanol can be made from natural gas, coal, industrial garbage and even recycled carbon dioxide captured from power stations' smokestacks -- an elegant way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
[Israel]
Israel offers a fourth testament to what leadership, ingenuity and audacity can achieve. Last year, it launched an electric-car venture designed to turn Israel -- which obviously has some tensions with the region's big oil producers -- into an oil-free economy.
Israelis will soon be able to replace their gasoline-fueled cars with battery-operated ones, which they'll plug into the hundreds of thousands of recharging points planned to be erected throughout the country. Israeli motorists, the government hopes, will be able to swap their batteries in a matter of minutes at dedicated stations or recharge them at home or at work.
"Oil is the greatest problem of all time -- the great polluter and promoter of terror," said Israeli President Shimon Peres, the project's political patron. "We should get rid of it."
For each of the four countries, knocking oil off its pedestal is no longer a theoretical proposition but a reality in the making. But despite the lip service our own politicians pay to the need to reduce our oil dependence, none of the solutions offered by Iran, Brazil, China and Israel are even under consideration in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Just go down the list. Natural-gas vehicles are nowhere to be seen. Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol is barred from the country by a steep 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff, courtesy of ethanol protectionists and their representatives in Congress. (No tariff is imposed on imported oil, of course.)
For similar reasons, flex-fuel cars sold in the United States are certified to run only on ethanol, keeping methanol and other viable biofuels off the market -- even though they are cheaper and can be made from a wealth of coal and biomass resources.
The kind of electric cars deployed in Israel have never returned to U.S. showrooms since General Motors' mass crushing of its EV1 -- the subject of the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" ...''
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Commentator 1 wrote on 7-9-08:
``Good news that oil folks are getting on the band wagon ...
The T. Boone Pickens Plan
America is addicted to foreign oil. It's an addiction that threatens our economy, our environment and our national security. It touches every part of our daily lives and ties our hands as a nation and a people.
The addiction has worsened for decades and now it's reached a point of crisis. In 1970, we imported 24% of our oil. Today it's nearly 70% and growing.
As imports grow and world prices rise, the amount of money we send to foreign nations every year is soaring. At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone - that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.
Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion; it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.
America uses a lot of oil. Every day 85 million barrels of oil are produced around the world. And 21 million of those are used here in the United States. That's 25% of the world's oil demand. Used by just 4% of the world's population ...
What's the good news?
The United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind power. Studies from around the world show that the Great Plains states are home to the greatest wind energy potential in the world by far.
The Department of Energy reports that 20% of America's electricity can come from wind. North Dakota alone has the potential to provide power for more than a quarter of the country.
Today's wind turbines stand up to 410 feet tall, with blades that stretch 148 feet in length. The blades collect the wind's kinetic energy. In one year, a 3-megawatt wind turbine produces as much energy as 12,000 barrels of imported oil.
Wind power currently accounts for 48 billion kWh of electricity a year in the United States -- enough to serve more than 4.5 million households. That is still only about 1% of current demand, but the potential of wind is much greater.
A 2005 Stanford University study found that there is enough wind power worldwide to satisfy global demand 7 times over -- even if only 20% of wind power could be captured.
Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20% of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.
That's a lot of money, but it's a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it's a bargain.
Developing wind power is an investment in rural America.
To witness the economic promise of wind energy, look no further than Sweetwater, Texas.
Sweetwater was typical of many small towns in middle-America. With a shortage of good jobs, the youth of Sweetwater were leaving in search of greater opportunities. And the town's population dropped from 12,000 to under 10,000.
When a large wind power facility was built outside of town, Sweetwater experienced a revival. New economic opportunity brought the town back to life and the population has grown back up to 12,000.
In the Texas panhandle, just north of Sweetwater, is the town of Pampa, where T. Boone Pickens' Mesa Power is currently building the largest wind farm in the world. At 4,000 megawatts -- the equivalent combined output of four large coal-fire plants -- the production of the completed Pampa facility will double the wind energy output of the United States.
In addition to creating new construction and maintenance jobs, thousands of Americans will be employed to manufacture the turbines and blades. These are high skill jobs that pay on a scale comparable to aerospace jobs.
Plus, wind turbines don't interfere with farming and grazing, so they don't threaten food production or existing local economies.
A cheap new replacement for foreign oil.
The Honda Civic GX Natural Gas Vehicle is the cleanest internal-combustion vehicle in the world according to the EPA.
Natural gas and bio-fuels are the only domestic energy sources used for transportation. Natural gas is the cleanest transportation fuel available today.
According to the California Energy Commission, critical greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas are 23% lower than diesel and 30% lower than gasoline.
Natural gas vehicles (NGV) are already available and combine top performance with low emissions. The natural gas Honda Civic GX is rated as the cleanest production vehicle in the world.
According to NGVAmerica, there are more than 7 million NGVs in use worldwide, but only 150,000 of those are in the United States.
The EPA estimates that vehicles on the road account for 60% of carbon monoxide pollution and around one-third of hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions in the United States. As federal and state emissions laws become more stringent, many requirements will be unattainable with conventionally fueled vehicles.
Since natural gas is significantly cleaner than petroleum, NGVs are increasing in popularity. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach recently announced that 16,800 old diesel trucks will be replaced, and half of the new vehicles will run on alternatives such as natural gas.
Natural gas is significantly less expensive than gasoline or diesel. In places like Utah and Oklahoma, prices are less than $1 a gallon. To see fueling stations and costs in your area, check out www.cngprices.com/
Natural gas is our country's second largest energy resource and a vital component of our energy supply. 98% of the natural gas used in the United States is from North America. But 70% of our oil is purchased from foreign nations.
Natural gas is one of the cleanest, safest and most useful forms of energy -- residentially, commercially and industrially. The natural gas industry has existed in the United States for over 100 years and continues to grow.
Domestic natural gas reserves are twice that of petroleum. And new discoveries of natural gas and ongoing development of renewable biogas are continually adding to existing reserves.
While it is a cheap, effective and versatile fuel, less than 1% of natural gas is currently used for transportation.
The Mechanics
We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity. Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel -- reducing our dependence on foreign oil by more than one-third.
How do we get it done?
The Pickens Plan is a bridge to the future -- a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us time to develop even greater new technologies.
Building new wind generation facilities and better utilizing our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years. But it will take leadership ...''
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Commentator 2 wrote:
Despite its obvious (at least to me) insanity, the proposal to drill oil wells in ANWR and off the coasts of California and Florida seems to be riding high on a tsunami of gullibility.
I think the moral of the Appointmnet in Samarra is not that one cannot escape Death, but that we can choose where to die. And thus it is important where we fight the Kondratieff Peak War of 2020 -- will we send young Americans to Central Asia to die for oil in the Kazakh War of 2020? Continuing to use petroleum is probably the most serious threat ever to American national security. So Hooray for T. Boone Pickens.
If the Strait of Hormuz is closed, rock oil could be $300/barrel by Christmas 2008. Otherwise it is likely that oil will be $40/barrel by the end of the year -- just like the Tulip Bubble, the bursting of the Oil Bubble will be spectacular. But then what happens to Alternative Energy?, the 1970's all over again?
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COLUMN from The New York Times, 7-27-08, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
``Texas to Tel Aviv
What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of 'Dallas' and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club' You'd get T. Boone Pickens. What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin' You'd get Shai Agassi. And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world's leader in electric cars'
You'd have the start of an energy revolution.
The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power. Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai.
Agassi, age 40, is an Israeli software whiz kid who rose to the senior ranks of the German software giant SAP. He gave it all up in 2007 to help make Israel a model of how an entire country can get off gasoline and onto electric cars.
He figured no country has a bigger interest in diminishing the value of Middle Eastern oil than Israel. On a visit to Israel in May, I took a spin in a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront in Agassi's prototype electric car, while his sister watched out for the cops because it is not yet licensed for Israeli roads.
Agassi's plan, backed by Israel's government, is to create a complete electric car 'system' that will work much like a mobile-phone service "system," only customers sign up for so many monthly miles, instead of minutes. Every subscriber will get a car, a battery and access to a national network of recharging outlets all across Israel — as well as garages that will swap your dead battery for a fresh one whenever needed.
His company, Better Place, and its impressive team would run the smart grid that charges the cars and is also contracting for enough new solar energy from Israeli companies, 2 gigawatts over 10 years, to power the whole fleet. 'Israel will have the world's first virtual oilfield in the Negev Desert," said Agassi. His first 500 electric cars, built by Renault, will hit Israel's roads next year.
Agassi is a passionate salesman for his vision. He could sell camels to Saudi Arabia. 'Today in Europe, you pay $600 a month for gasoline," he explained to me. 'We have an electric car that will cost you $600 a month', with all the electric fuel you need and when you don't want the car any longer, just give it back. No extra charges and no CO2 emissions.
His goal, said Agassi, is to make his electric car 'so cheap, so trivial, that you won't even think of buying a gasoline car." Once that happens, he added, your oil addiction will be over forever. You'll be 'off heroin," he says, and 'addicted to milk."
T. Boone Pickens is 80. He's already made billions in oil ... But now he's opting for a different legacy: breaking America's oil habit by pushing for a massive buildup of wind power in the U.S. and converting our abundant natural gas supplies, now being used to make electricity, into transportation fuel to replace foreign oil in our cars, buses and trucks.
Pickens is motivated by American nationalism. Because of all the money we are shipping abroad to pay for our oil addiction, he says, 'we are on the verge of losing our superpower status." His vision is summed up on his Web site: 'We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year ... I have been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. If we create a renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil."
Pickens made clear to me over breakfast last week that he was tired of waiting for Washington to produce a serious energy plan. So his company, Mesa Power, is now building the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, where he's spent $2 billion buying land and 700 wind turbines from General Electric, the largest single turbine order ever. The U.S. could secure 20 percent of its electricity needs from wind alone.
But Pickens knows he's unique. Unless, he says, 'Congress adopts clear, predictable policies', with long-term tax incentives and infrastructure, so thousands of investors can jump into clean power, we'll never get the scale we need to break our addiction. For a year, Senate Republicans have been blocking such incentives for wind and solar energy. They vote again next week.
If only we had a Congress and president who, instead of chasing crazy schemes like offshore drilling and releasing oil from our strategic reserve, just sat down with Boone and Shai and asked one question: 'What laws do we need to enact to foster 1,000 more like you?' Then just do it, and get out of the way.''
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seekingalpha.com/article/93169-nbc-refuses-pickens-plan-ad
Seeking Alpha BLOG ENTRIES
NBC Refuses Pickens Plan Ad
by Paul Killinger posted on: August 29, 2008
``T. Boone Pickens is up in arms over NBC's decision not to run one of his new TV ads promoting the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel, and an alternative to importing expensive foreign oil. In an e-mail to supporters Mr. Pickens is quoted as saying;
"NBC is refusing to run one of our strongest ads, and I need your help in showing NBC they can't control what we can or cannot say. The 15-second ad talks about how the government of Iran is making a MAJOR effort to use natural gas in their vehicles so they can free up $120 a barrel oil to sell to us while we are doing nothing."
The new 15-second TV spot, entitled "Iran is Changing Its Cars to Run on Natural Gas," calls attention to this development by this OPEC member country. In the ad Mr. Pickens is pictured saying, "Get this one. Iran is changing its cars to run on natural gas and we're not doing a thing here." ...
Perhaps this confrontation between this Texas billionaire entrepreneur and TV network is much ado about nothing. Or maybe it's more than that. It is difficult to imagine this was simply a decision by some mid-level TV executive, and it was not approved by the head office of NBC. It also comes at a time when General Electric (GE), which owns NBC, and CEO Jeff Immelt are under fire from shareholders for the giant company's lackluster financial performance ...
Many Pickens Plan site bloggers are incensed by this snub, which some attribute to NBC's political bias or a conflict of interest by GE, which manufactures components for nuclear reactors and natural gas turbines for public utilities. However, since Mr. Pickens has ordered $2 billion of equipment from GE to operate his proposed wind farms, it is likely NBC's parent company will step in to diffuse this slight to one of their major customers before it escalates any further.
Paul Killinger
Aug 29, 2008
Actually, the move by NBC (GE) is simply a continuation of the media censorship of REAL energy policy ideas ...
Why, in light of $120/barrel oil, $4/gasoline, raging inflation, and an S&P500 that has returned less than 2.6% annually for the last 10 years do the leading "financial" media not want to solve our biggest challenge: oil? Throw in how the US is intentionally strengthening Russia, Sauid, Iran, and Iraq and you really have to wonder what ... is going on.
It is maddening. By the way, NBC did finally approve the Pickens ad ...
ED K
Aug 29, 2008
... By the way, McCain has voted against any renewable incentives over 25 times and has never voted for it. So grid lock is a more accurate description of the current situation, and when it comes to energy legislation, grid lock is directly attibutable to the Republicans. The Democrats will offer the grand compromise on off shore drilling in exchange for renewables incentives and new regulation on oil futures trading. Remember that Bush who never weilded a veto during six years of Republican controlled legislation, has made it clear he will veto the Democrat bill anyway without Anwar in the mix, so again, the so called Democratic Congress would be ten votes short in the Senate from over-riding ...
MurphMan
Aug 29, 2008
Funny how the Republicans held Congress for six years with a Republican president and they did every single thing that George W. Bush asked them to and the Democrats went right along with them. We had bipartisanship, and the oil companies reaped HUGE, H-U-G-E profits.
We could've had an energy policy but Vice President Dick Cheney had PRIVATE meetings with oil executives and refused to release ANY information about those meetings to the public ...
People are hurting all over this country over the price of gasoline and the Republicans and their sheeple think that drilling in ANWAR and offshore is a solution to the problem whereas it will be, at a minimum, ten years before this can have ANY effect and then only a very short term one.
Our problems are big and they will require a plan by the federal government to deal with them. We have been royally screwed by the Republicans and their Corporate masters. Too bad some people think that government can only make matters worse, whereas sometimes, sometimes, government is very necessary to deal with problems.
The need for an nuanced energy policy to help this country get back to being the vibrant nation is one of the most urgent needs we have. I do not know if the Democrats, if they actually get a functioning majority in the Senate and a president who can walk and chew gum at the same time will bring about what we need but it's about damn time we sit them down on the hot seat and see what they're made of ...
searcher
Aug 30, 2008
... I wish we as a people would not panic about energy cost. Yes, it is going up, and that is not good. But it is not terrible either. It is just normal, like growing old, and sometimes getting a cold. It happens.
When goods and services get scarcer, their prices rise ... For instance, when whale oil prices rose at the turn of the last century, guess what happened? People went looking for alternatives. When they found it in the ground, whaling became an enterprise of the past ... Government had nothing to do with the successful transition--it was all done by citizens in their roles as engineers, businessmen and women, and entrepreneurs.
The depletion of oil truly represents nothing more dramatic than a transition: a transition from liquid oil extraction to all of the following: Nuclear ($30), gas ($30), wind ($100), membrane bioreactor (waste gas capture) ($100), shale ($120), oil sands ($100), coal gasification ($90), geothermal ($200), conservation ($50 and up). By the way, those numbers represent the price of oil at which those technologies become competitive with oil in a big way.
Guess what happens when oil permanently reaches those prices? Absent government inteference, entrepreneurs will build new industries and make lots of money (as they should) supplying those sources of energy. All of those sources except shale and sands are very, very environmentally friendly. If you are a friend of the environment, you should pray, PRAY for the depletion of oil, because it will cause us to transition in an orderly fashion to nuclear, geo, wind, & membranes (no CO2 emissions) ...
By the way, consider some benefits of higher gas prices: less driving, CO2, gas guzzlers, sulfur, NOX emissions, highway deaths/injuries, hospital visits, suburban sprawl, etc. More trains, stay-home vacations, family time, electric cars, hybrids, conservation, etc, etc.
To summarize, increasing gas prices cause us to use less of a noxious, dwindling resource (good), and cause entrepreneurs and investors and engineers and business people to vigorously create profitable alternatives (good). If the government will get out of the way, in 100 years we will be talking about "drilling" the same way we we now talk about "whaling".
nakedjaybird
Aug 30, 2008
Hydro, wood, coal, biofuels and solar and were not priced in you work-up. Animal power, "ancient" farm windmills and tidal are also missing. I'm not sure putting conservation on the source side is valid. And further, you just proved that we should tax energy as Europe, et al, has to drive the US to conserve, electric trains, small cars, electrric delivery vans, scooters, much insulation, district heating; and co-generation, more hydro, more nuclear, more wind, more solar; and less drill, drill, drill and less dig, dig, dig. Bottom line - create change thru taxation ...
nakedjaybird
Aug 30, 2008
And furthermore, taxation or lack of it (tax breaks, subsidies, R&D credits, depletion allowances, etc.,) is exactly how we favor oil, gas, coal, nuc, hydro, biofuels, etc., and we are refusing to do the same for wind and solar which are the only two really free energy, renewable, forever energy sources in the list.''
nakedjaybird
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www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/28/pickens-ad-rejected-by-nb_n_122074.html
The Huffington Post, 8-30-08
``T. Boone Pickens, Carl Pope and John Podesta -- Sierra Club's Carl Pope himself at a panel with Pickens the oil man and Podesta from the Center for American Progress:
Pickens on offshore drilling: "This isn't about the oil industry wanting to drill offshore -- they don't think anything's there: just look at what they did and didn't lease when the western gulf tracts were offered up."''
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news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080828/tv_nm/pickens_nbc_dc
NEWS ARTICLE from Yahoo News, 8-27-08, by Ritsuko Ando
``NBC approves Pickens' "Iran" ad after complaint
NEW YORK (Reuters) - NBC Universal approved an advertisement by T. Boone Pickens entitled "Iran" which questions U.S. dependence on foreign oil, after the oil tycoon complained that the network had rejected it.
Pickens said in a statement earlier on Wednesday that the video commercial has been cleared by every U.S. television network except for NBC Universal and called on the unit of General Electric Co to reconsider its rejection.
In the 15-second ad entitled "Iran," Pickens says: "Get this one, Iran is changing its cars to run on natural gas and we're not doing a thing here."
"They're doing this to use less oil and sell it for a $120 a barrel. We can switch our cars to natural gas and stop sending our dollars to foreign countries," says Pickens ...''
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T. Boone Pickens Statement on Meeting With U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) in Reno, Nevada
August 17, 2008
``DALLAS, Aug 17, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Below is a statement issued by T. Boone Pickens following his meeting this morning with U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL):
``I enjoyed the opportunity to meet Senator Obama and discuss an issue that is America's top priority, which is ending our dependence on foreign oil that today is approaching 70 percent of our imports and is costing us $700 billion a year ...
We discussed my plan and the opportunities to create jobs, grow our economy and revitalize America's heartland by using private capital to invest in renewable energy including wind and solar power that are among our most abundant and untapped natural resources. I shared my feeling of encouragement at the Senator's willingness to speak out on energy issues recently in the campaign, but told him that there is still much more that needs to be done.
"We also discussed the Pickens Plan's success and our efforts to get more than one million supporters. These are people who share an immense concern about our dependence on foreign oil and are actively pushing our solution to this issue with the goal of getting legislation passed in the first 100 days of the next administration.
It would be inappropriate for me to speak for Senator Obama. I have a real sense, however, that he was very engaged. He understands the issues and is interested and excited by the work we are doing to educate and involve the people of this great nation. As with any leader, he knows that developing real energy policy that will transform America for the better requires change and that change happens not just from the top down, but from the bottom up and that's what we are doing with the Pickens Plan.''
For more information about The Pickens Plan, please visit
SOURCE: T. Boone Pickens
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www.vaildaily.com/article/20080817/EDITS/677804781/1078&ParentProfile=1062
EDITORIAL from The Vail Daily News, CO, 8-17-08
``The oil illusion
When oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens takes up the wind-power call and says "we can't drill our way out of this one," do you think we should listen?
When simple analytics and basic arithmetic show that opening up more of our offshore environment to oil drilling won't reduce gas prices and will only make a tiny dent in our petroleum demand, and then not for another decade or two, does that mean a return to reason and a firm push to a more sustainable national energy policy?
Not if politics has anything to do with it. The latest casualty of logic is our own representative in Congress, Mark Udall. The normally sensible Democrat, in his race for a U.S. Senate seat, has joined the chorus to drill, drill, drill and severely compromised his long-standing commitment to sustainable energy. Sure, Udall says more drilling should be part of an overall plan that includes other solutions, but the reality is it's a cynical response to polls that show most Americans think drilling will quickly reduce prices at the pump.
That's simply not true, and it's incumbent upon more progressive voices like that of Udall and Barack Obama, who also reversed his stance to embrace more drilling, to put the facts in front of the American people and support what they know is right, not what they think will help get them elected ...''
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www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/july-dec08/tbpickens_08-11.html
TRANSCRIPT from The News Hour, 8-11-08
``Former Oilman Makes Bid for Homegrown Alternative Energy
T. Boone Pickens, a Texan oil tycoon, has made it his mission to promote massive new investment toward alternative energy sources. Pickens discusses his plan and efforts to make energy independence a central issue in the fall campaign.
RAY SUAREZ: A political conservative, a lifelong Republican, T. Boone Pickens first made his name and his fortune as an American oil man. His takeover bids during the 1980s earned him his reputation as a corporate raider to some, a shareholder activist to others.
Pickens became a billionaire and one of the wealthiest men in the world. In 2004, he financed the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry's presidential bid.
But in 2008, Pickens is capturing new attention for a very different cause in this election. He's launched a major advertising campaign to pitch his plan to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil ...
T. BOONE PICKENS, Oil Executive: Did you know, back in 1970, we imported 24 percent of our oil and, by 1990, it was 42 percent? Today it's almost 70 percent and climbing every minute.
Over $700 billion are leaving this country to foreign nations every year. That's four times the cost of the Iraqi war, and it's killing our economy. It'll be the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind ...
RAY SUAREZ: For more details about the plan and how T. Boone Pickens is hoping to change the political debate on energy, he joins us now. He's in Dallas this evening.
Welcome, Mr. Pickens.
T. BOONE PICKENS: Thank you, Ray. I'd like to see the natural gas move out of power generation and that be replaced by wind and solar, and that natural gas moves in to the transportation fuel business, competing with foreign oil in gasoline and diesel.
RAY SUAREZ: Now, let's learn a little more about the basics of the plan, for those people who've just seen the spots. What are some of the details?
T. BOONE PICKENS: Well, details on the plan -- let me go into it this way. We're importing now almost 70 percent of all the oil we use every day in America. That, from a security standpoint, is totally unacceptable.
And when we look at the Russian-Georgian situation, it is related. And Russia has oil, and we don't. We have 3 percent of the oil in the world ...
The plan is that I want to use -- I want to bring in wind and solar. We have a beautiful wind corridor from Texas to Canada. And we have an equally beautiful solar corridor from Texas to California. Those can be brought in for power generation.
And we have plenty of natural gas in the United States. We have the equivalent of about 200 billion barrels of oil, which is equivalent of -- what the Saudis have in oil, we have in natural gas.
Well, natural gas is actually a better fuel than gasoline and diesel. It's cleaner; it's cheaper; it's abundant; and it's ours.
And I'd like to see the natural gas move out of power generation and that be replaced by wind and solar, and that natural gas moves in to the transportation fuel business, competing with foreign oil in gasoline and diesel.
That can be accomplished, and I think we could do it rather quickly. How much? I would say 30 percent -- we can take out 30 percent of our imports. And 38 percent of our oil comes from the Mideast and Africa, the unstable areas.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, let me jump in right there, because I understand that setting up those turbines to exploit that wind energy that's sweeping across the center of the United States would cost about a trillion dollars and modifying the grid to take up all that electricity that that wind would generate would cost about another $200 billion. Where are you going to get all that money?
T. BOONE PICKENS: All that will be done by the private sector. If you do a trillion dollars worth of turbines, you're going to actually generate 400,000 megawatts of power. And we presently use 987,000 megawatts in the United States. That's what our power is built out to is 987,000.
And it's overbuilt at that point, but you must have that when you have a real stress and surge on the system. But don't worry about the trillion dollars. That's not a government cost. That will be a private industry cost ...
RAY SUAREZ: Are you getting much response to the plan so far? And are you getting more of a response than you would have if oil was still $50 or $75 a barrel?
T. BOONE PICKENS: Well, I don't think you would if it was $50 or $75. You had to get it up higher for people to realize that we had a problem ...
[People are] starting to see that the $700 billion that we're paying for foreign oil, that money, a great part of it, could be kept in the United States, and create jobs, and make a profit here, and pay taxes, and make our economy go forward. But the $700 billion that we pay for foreign oil does nothing for our economy here ...
RAY SUAREZ: But instead of building a national grid for distributing natural gas [there are many existing gas pipelines that can be initially used] as a fuel to personal transportation, wouldn't it make more sense to keep making electricity with it and just have people plug in their cars?
T. BOONE PICKENS: Well, I love the plug-in. That's fine with me. But you can't get to any numbers that way. The other day, somebody said, "We'll have a million cars on the plug-in hybrid in 10 years." We have 250 million cars in the United States ...
What I want to do is get the natural gas into the transportation fuel and then we take out the trucks, is where it needs to go, not the personal cars. And so the infrastructure to do that -- see, it costs -- about 30 percent of our transportation fuel goes to move goods every day in the United States, and those are the trucks that are moving the goods. So those are the ones that I want to get on natural gas.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, as someone who's heavily invested in both wind and natural gas, don't you stand to also see a pretty good payday if this plan is accepted?
T. BOONE PICKENS: Well, I've had enough paydays, and that's fine to say that. But the wind, I feel like I'm a pioneer by committing to a $10 billion wind project.
And front seat means nothing in the wind business, because the wind corridor from Texas to Canada will accommodate any number of players in it. My project is 4,000 megawatts. I believe that corridor could easily handle 400,000 megawatts.
And so, you know, I've given in the last five years over $700 million, and my estate will go to charity. So don't worry about what I make out of the deal ... I'll create jobs. And if I make profits, I'll pay taxes.
But that doesn't have anything to do with this. This is [about] security for America ...''
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www.pickensplan.com/news/2008/08/04/in-response-to-todays-energy-speech-from-sen-barack-obama/
In Response to Today?s Energy Speech From Sen. Barack Obama
T. BOONE PICKENS STATEMENT ON U.S. SENATOR BARACK OBAMA'S (D-IL) SPEECH ON U.S. ENERGY POLICY
Dallas, TX, August 4, 2008
Below is that statement of T. Boone Pickens on U.S. Senator Barack Obama's (D-IL) speech on U.S. national energy policy:
``I'm strongly encouraged by Senator Obama's speech on America's energy future. Foreign oil is killing our economy and putting our nation at risk.
"When I started this campaign my goal was to make this the biggest issue in the coming election and the top priority to be addressed in the first hundred days of the next administration. This issue is clearly moving up in the priority of political debate;  Senator Obama's statement is an indication that is what is indeed happening.
"I will continue to push this as a priority for the rest of the year."
Commentator 3 wrote:
I support the Pickens Plan for energy independance as a workable plan to reduce or eliminate our increasing need for imported oil. Importing oil has become more than an expense for us. It is threatening our economy and security, and increasingly the need for oil is considered before the interests of freedom and democracy whose values we should hold dearly. I am excited about the secondary benefits of incorporating solar and wind generated electricity into our economy. A cleaner, more sustainable energy source that creates new possibilitys for industrys and services will have a dramatic possitive effect for our future.
Commentator 4 wrote:
The main effect of the miltary adventure in Iraq, whether intended or not, was to reduce Iraqi oil production and raise the price of oil. Those benefiting from this don't want the supply situation to change. But Iraqi oil prodcution is increasing. So what can the owners of oil wells do? Answer: Threaten an attack on the Iranian oil fields by either Israel or the U.S. -- even Iran is playing this card as it rattles its missiles. However, the threat is not working any more; and there is a real possibility that oil will plunge past the Saudi "fair price" of $70/barrel to $40/barrel before the end of 2008. WE MUST THINK NOW HOW TO COMBAT THE THREAT OF CHEAP OIL. AMERICAN NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE.
Commentator 5 wrote:
There is an oil BOOM RIGHT NOW in N. Dakota, S. Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada. It's called the Bakken Oil Formation and covers over 200,000 square miles. Please Google "Bakken Oil Formation" and then read press releases from these publically traded companies, symbols, EOG, CLR, and XTO. Oil is flowing today, not in 3 or 4 years!! N. Dakota had a record month in July pumping more oil than any month since 1984!! Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion in Bakken and smaller companies are scrambling for leases. Farmers are becoming overnight millionaires with royalties from only one or two wells!! Come on people, educate yourselves!! ...
Commentator 4 wrote:
We should think of foreign oil as heroin. If it can not be immediately outlawed, at least a $100/barrel tariff should be slapped on it. Is oil money being used to support the Russian invasion of Georgia? Will young Americans be dying for oil in the Kazakh War of 2020? With 70% of the oil we use coming from abroad, it is madness to feed our oil addiction by using more oil. The Pickens Plan is a way out. As Mr. Pickens said last night (8-11-08) on the News Hour, we could reduce our oil consumption by 30% within 5 years just by converting trucks to liquified natural gas.
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www.newsweek.com/id/151727/page/1
FEATURE ARTICLE from Newsweek, 8-9-08, By Karen Breslau
``The Pickens Profile You Haven't Read
T. Boone Pickens can't read his lines. Squinting at his teleprompter, he is posing in front of a mile-long ribbon of wind turbines, churning against an endless Texas sky. Pickens is in Sweetwater, a town of 12,000 that bills itself as the nation's wind-energy capital, to shoot a commercial urging Americans to put themselves on a new energy diet: cutting out imported oil, which costs $700 billion a year, in favor of domestically produced sources such as wind and natural gas. "Our dependence on foreign oil means that we are buying from our enemies," he drawls into the camera, veering from the script ...
What's in it for Pickens? He is investing $10 billion to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas panhandle. Through another venture, Clean Energy Fuels Corp., he is the country's largest private owner of natural-gas fueling stations. If demand for these sources soars, as his plan envisions, he is positioned to win big. Pickens, who claims he's worth $4 billion (Fortune says $3 billion), scoffs at the notion that he's driven by profit. "I don't need to make any more money," ...
Having a huge impact is a recurring theme in Pickens's life. As a paperboy in tiny Holdenville, Oklahoma, a plucky young Boone persuaded his boss to let him invade the routes of other boys by selling more papers. "It was my first experience in the takeover field: expansion by acquisition," he writes in his forthcoming memoir, "The First Billion Is the Hardest," to be published early next month [9-08] ...
As the millions turned into billions, Pickens also confronted failure and loss, all in one annus horribilis in 1996. He got a divorce, lost his best friends in a car crash, and received a taste of his own medicine when he was forced out as CEO of Mesa Petroleum, the oil company he built into one of the world's largest independents ...
Pickens likes to portray his years as a corporate buccaneer during the 1980s as "shareholder activism." When Mesa fell into a cash crisis in the mid '90s after the price of natural gas collapsed, there was no mercy for him on Wall Street. Pickens called in Texas financier Richard Rainwater, and his wife and business partner, Darla Moore, to help raise capital. (Rainwater helped another oilman, George W. Bush, escape his money problems by making him co-owner of the Texas Rangers, a deal that eventually made Bush a multimillionaire.)
Moore, a leveraged-buyout specialist dubbed "the Toughest Babe in the Business" by Fortune, tried to raise $1 billion on Wall Street for Mesa. "I found out there wasn't a bank in the country that would touch the deal if Boone was CEO," Moore told NEWSWEEK. "I tried to soften the message [but] he was really surprised. 'But I get along with all those guys,' is what he said." The Rainwaters worked out a deal for Pickens to retire as CEO, and bought him out, a deal that still rankles the billionaire ...
Pickens says private investors will provide the $1 trillion or so to erect thousands of turbines through the wind corridor stretching from the Panhandle to Canada. But it will take Congress and a new president to build a national power grid connecting the wind corridor, as well as the emerging solar corridor across the desert Southwest, to the nation's population centers.
It's a challenge Pickens likens to creating the Interstate Highway system in the 1950s. The grid could cost about $200 billion, but compared with the $700 billion exported each year to pay the country's oil tab, says Pickens, "it's a bargain." ...
When it comes to energy, Pickens bills himself as "bipartisan." He's disappointed that Republicans whose careers he's financed, including George W. Bush, have done little in his view to guarantee energy security ... He says he has no plans to donate to McCain, in order to avoid confusion about his motives ...
And what, exactly are those motives? This being Pickens, they are complex. He says rebuilding the American energy system "is the most important work I've ever done." ...''
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www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=12&a=357920
ARTICLE from The Rochester MN Post-Bulletin, 8-25-08, By Myriam Marquez, Columnist for the Miami Herald
``Ruining the coast is not the answer
DESTIN, Fla. -- Staring out at the Gulf Coast's clear emerald waters, toes deep into the sugar-white sand, you can't help but wonder how much longer this heavenly slice of Florida will remain unspoiled.
The Panhandle's so-called Redneck Riviera has its luxury hotels and golf courses and Disney-like tidy downtowns at the Sandestin resort, but the Gulf of Mexico remains the big draw. No condo canyons here. The beach, while packed in spots with vacationers from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas, opens to huge swaths of protected Florida dunes and no-build beaches.
What would it be like with oil and gas drills just 50 miles off the coast? What would happen in a hurricane? Would the alabaster sand turn black with gook spilled from platforms or tankers? Would the putrid smell of oil and gas overwhelm the senses?
Once again Florida's pristine Gulf Coast and the state's $65 billion tourism industry are in jeopardy.
Our lame-duck president says it's time to go back to the 20th century. The former oil man proposes letting states decide if they want drilling on their coasts -- just as polls show 60 percent of Floridians hit with $4-a-gallon gas at the pump might be desperate enough to allow it ...
Oil companies already have federal leases on 39 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. They're drilling in only 7 million ...
There are no short-term fixes to our dependency on foreign oil. We need an energy policy that protects our environment and our pocketbooks while freeing us of our oil addiction. And that will take years to accomplish.
Barack Obama's ... compromise [might be] worth exploring. At least Obama's proposing $150 billion on energy alternatives. He wants vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, too -- a smart move President Bush and McCain have refused to embrace.
Maybe Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens will help McCain rethink his gas simplicity plan. Pickens is pushing wind, natural gas and other alternative sources.
He points out that oil reached its production peak in 2005. Americans are 4 percent of the world's population but use 25 percent of the oil supply. Do the math.
Slipping into the warm Gulf waters on a spectacular August day, not a glob of tar to worry about -- yet I couldn't help but find Florida on the losing end of that equation.''
Posted on 8/25/2008
``Republicans controlled both houses of congress and the presidency until Jan 2007 and they ... didn't notice we had an energy crisis until gas reached $4 per gallon. although the price of oil had been steadily rising since Bush invaded Iraq.''
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www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080825/VOICES05/808250314/1052/OPINION01
MY VOICE COLUMN ftom The Argus Leader, Sioux Falls, SD, 8-25-08, by James G. Abourezk
``America should avoid playing losing game
Almost 70 percent of the American public is in favor of drilling for oil offshore. Sensing an advantage over Barack Obama on this issue, John McCain has hammered this song almost to death. It seems obvious that either Karl Rove or his henchmen who are running McCain's presidential campaign have got Obama's number because after a bit of pushing, Obama now says he's for offshore drilling as well.
It's too bad because those who are trying to talk sense on this subject are being drowned out by ... the propaganda campaign by President Bush and his friends in Big Oil. To find out who is making sense and who is making demagoguery, we need to listen to people who really have no dog in the fight.
Texan oilman T. Boone Pickens recently and famously said, "We can't drill our way out of this emergency." When an oil billionaire talks like this, there must be something there.
What Pickens and other neutral oil experts such as Robert Kaufman of Boston University are telling us is that even if we started drilling today, it would be 10 years before any of that oil would come online. McCain tries to tell us that offshore drilling will end high gas prices this week. But don't you believe it.
Kaufman also tells us that there already are approved offshore oil fields containing more than 40 billion barrels of oil. If Big Oil and McCain were serious about wanting to drill for oil, those fields would be a good place to start. They already are approved, so there's nothing stopping them from drilling. Nothing, that is, except the expense of such oil exploration.
So we really are not talking about production problems. We are, instead, talking about who should be making the big bucks and about the oil industry increasing its profits by drilling in areas that are in danger environmentally.
As Kaufman has so categorically stated, even if the prohibited offshore fields were opened today, disregarding the damage to the environment, those prohibited areas contain only about 18 billion barrels of oil - far less than the areas already approved. The difference to our oil supply would be only about 1 percent to 4 percent a decade from now, which would not even catch up to the dwindling supplies and increasing demand at that future time.
The same is true for drilling in Alaska in the heretofore prohibited Arctic National Wildlife Refuge [ANWR]. Should that drilling be allowed, the most America could realize from that field would be 1 million barrels a day 10 years from now. Because ... world oil consumption is now 86 million barrels a day, opening up the protected area in Alaska would make almost no difference when one takes into account what certainly will be a worldwide decline in production during that 10-year period ...
Oil is a finite commodity. On this count we should again listen to Pickens as well as to the other critics of increased offshore drilling in prohibited areas. We should develop alternative sources of energy that would really stop our dependence on oil, whether it comes from foreign countries or from America's outer continental shelf.
If we could find a way to make the oil and automobile industries rich from alternative sources of energy - wind, solar, hydrogen fuel cells, etc. - those corporations could then mobilize their SERVANTS in Congress to push for such sources instead of the losing game of drilling for oil in all the wrong places.''
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