Boone Pickens said he plans to spend $58 million on a multimedia campaign to get more of a focus on solcing the nation's energy crisi.
By Sean Murphy
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Billionaire Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is returning to his native state Wednesday to tout his new plan for weaning the U.S. off its dependence on foreign oil.
Pickens, a native of Holdenville, will visit McAlester for the third in a series of town-hall meetings to generate grass roots support for his “Pickens Plan,” which calls for erecting wind turbines across the Midwest to generate electricity, replacing the 22 percent of U.S. power produced from natural gas. The freed-up natural gas then could be used to fuel cars and trucks now reliant on gasoline and diesel.
Pickens said he’s had positive feedback from those who attended similar meetings in Kansas and Colorado.
“In Topeka, we had three times as many people as we thought we would. The same thing happened in Colorado,” Pickens said Tuesday. “There’s no question there’s a great amount of interest in what I’m talking about.
“It’s about the future of energy in America.”
Pickens is spending about $58 million to promote the plan through television commercials and mass mailings. He anticipates it will cost about $1 trillion to construct the wind facilities and another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit the energy to the power-hungry coastal cities.
He said the infrastructure would be built by private industry and that the costs are relatively insignificant compared to the $700 billion the country spends each year on foreign oil.
Plus, he said the project would help revitalize an economically depressed section of the nation’s midsection.
“There’s only one loser in this, and that’s foreign oil,” Pickens said.
Pickens said his plan would require Congress to renew the Wind Energy Production tax credit for another ten years and ease permitting restrictions so that transmission lines could be built quickly to move the power from rural wind farms to the rest of the country.
Critics have pointed out that Pickens’ proposal aligns with his own business interests — a major investment in a wind farm in the Texas Panhandle and majority ownership in a company that supplies fuel for natural gas vehicles.
But Pickens said he’s motivated not by money but by helping to secure a safer, cleaner source of energy for the country’s future.
“I’ve got enough money,” Pickens said.
David Friedman, research director for the vehicles program at the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said he believes Pickens is on the right track with his wind proposal, but questions how effective natural gas will be as a long-term fuel source for the country’s vehicles.
“When it comes to the wind side, the Pickens’ plan is a home run,” Friedman said. “The tricky part of the plan is the vehicle side.”
Friedman also said natural gas-fired electricity plans are crucial to helping meet the nation’s peak demand for power.
“Rather than trying to target half of our vehicles to run on natural gas, maybe he should target 10 percent to go on natural gas,” Friedman said. “That would be more realistic, plus it would help set up natural gas as a stepping stone, a bridge to longer-term technologies like hydrogen.”
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