Pickens: Energy, fuel should be ‘Made in America’

Texas oil magnate T. Boone Pickens gave a rousing endorsement of American-made energy and fuels during the first Oklahoma Wind Energy Conference Tuesday, which drew more than 1,100 people.
“We’re going to go with everything American,” he said, touting his Pickens Plan for energy independence.
His plan calls for using domestic wind energy to replace the 22 percent of electrical generation currently supplied by natural gas. That natural gas — of which America has vast reserves — could then be diverted to fuel cars.
Consumers’ cars are not as important as the national trucking fleet, he pointed out. “Thirty percent of our daily oil consumption is used to move goods,” he said.
Swift Trucking, the nation’s largest, has 20,000 trucks on the road, and Wal-Mart another 8,000. Pickens said he has talked to the companies about his plan. Company officials said they turn over their entire fleets every three years, so bringing in new technology could be done in a relatively short time.
Converting all 200,000 federal vehicles to run on some kind of American-made, and possibly renewable fuel, would also be a great step forward, he said.
“In three years, we could start to make a dent in our imports,” which now account for 70 percent of domestic oil consumption.
Many officials at the conference pointed out that utility scale wind energy infrastructure is a huge and long-term investment. Farms and transmission lines can take 7 to 15 years to build. Growth of the industry is restrained by a chicken-and-egg problem compounded by an insufficient and overtaxed power transmission system.
That’s why Pickens, who is originally from Holdenville, Okla., and other conference speakers emphasized repeatedly the importance of a comprehensive long-term plan that would include broad public support. Wind industry supporters are lobbying for the creation of a wind energy infrastructure modeled on the federal interstate highway system.
Pickens presented his plan to the White House last year, but met with little success, so he began waging a campaign to drum up support around the country. He now claims a million and a half endorsers. Pickens was enthusiastic about the prospects under a new administration, saying that President-elect Obama recognizes that dependence on foreign oil will eventually drive oil prices back up to $300 a barrel.
“There’s no question we’re paying for both sides of a war,” he said. “That’s not very smart. I think that borders on stupid.”
He continued, “We’re going to have an energy plan within the next 30 days for the first time in America in 40 years. A big part of it is going to be renewables.”
If it seems a little unusual to see oil magnates — once antagonistic toward upstarts that sought to rob part of their market — aggressively pushing alternative energy, it is a reflection of a rapidly changing business climate.
Most oil and gas companies are diversifying their portfolios to include renewable fuels, says Greg Adams, a farmer from Buffalo, Okla., who helps develop utility scale wind projects in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas for Chermac Energy Corp. He’s been working to develop wind energy for almost a decade.
“It’s been a long road,” he says. “It went from no economic development opportunities in sight to what we have today. I am amazed by the crowd. It’s nice to see an industry finally come into its own.”
“A lot of high profile oil and gas people are active in the renewable fuels field,” he continues. “Now, that wasn’t the case 10 years ago, but today it is. Because of the maturation of the industry, we actually have a shot at getting something done and helping our nation move itself off of fossil fuels and more into renewables.”