A Good Start on a National Energy Policy

The News & Advance
Published: August 5, 2008

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens knows a thing or two about producing energy — especially from oil. He has pockets full of money to show for it.

Now he wants to wean the United States away from its $700 billion-a-year foreign oil habit to other sources of energy, primarily wind power and natural gas. He’s on the right track on a subject that has risen to the top as an issue in this year’s presidential race. And yes, the plan could be profitable for him.

The high cost of oil has driven Pickens to this point. The resulting high price of gasoline has prompted lots of folks to listen to what Pickens has to say rather than dismiss him as another crackpot seeking alternatives to oil when there seem to be none.

“Our dependence on imported oil is killing our economy,” he told an audience last month. “It is the single biggest problem facing America today,” he said, adding, “As we import more and more of our energy, we are participating the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, sending billions of our dollars overseas to buy oil for a commodity that lasts 90 days until burned in our gas tanks.”

He has put together a plan to reduce those imports, a plan that you may have heard him talk about in his television commercials. They are part of a $58 million promotion to get the nation and its leaders to think seriously about how to change heavy reliance on imported oil.

In short, Pickens wants to:

w Boost production of electricity from wind turbines. He says it is an environmentally friendly way to provide more electricity for the country.

w Boost the use of natural gas, which is cheaper than gasoline, as a fuel for automobiles. It is also a cleaner fuel.

w Slash oil consumption, which accomplishment of the first two steps would achieve.

As he explained to an audience in Topeka, Kan., the other night, the plan calls for erecting wind turbines in the Midwest to generate electricity. That would replace the 22 percent of electricity now produced from natural gas. The freed up natural gas then could be used to power vehicles that now rely on gasoline and diesel fuel.

The corridor of wind turbines would stretch from the Texas Panhandle through western Kansas to North Dakota. They would be paid for by the federal government and private investors.

Pickens has already signed on to build a $2 billion wind farm in the Texas Panhandle and reportedly could spend as much as $10 billion on the project.

“Anything we do is cheap compared to what we pay out for foreign oil,” Pickens said. “We are very close to a disaster for this country and we have to move as fast as we can.”

He warned that oil could cost $300 a barrel in 10 years as supplies drop if the nation continues to drift on energy policy. And, in the absence of an energy policy, that is exactly what it has done.

Pickens has compared the effort to that of former President Dwight Eisenhower who declared an emergency to begin construction of an interstate highway system in the 1950s.

While Pickens has not talked as much as he could about conservation of energy, he has helped move the subject of energy independence from a fuzzy notion conjured up by environmentalists to a plan with the potential of actually moving the nation in that direction.

The Pickens plan is a good start. Is anyone in Washington listening to him?