GOP Nominee
Former Candidates
Conservative activist and oilman T. Boone Pickens has unveiled his plan to decrease our nation’s dependency on foreign energy sources. Entitled, “The Pickens Plan”, Mr. Pickens proposal relies on the development of Wind technology.
Here’s a video outlining the details:
Mr. Pickens also authored an Op-Ed for today’s Wall Street Journal to further his case. Here’s a snippet:
One of the benefits of being around a long time is that you get to know a lot about certain things. I’m 80 years old and I’ve been an oilman for almost 60 years. I’ve drilled more dry holes and also found more oil than just about anyone in the industry. With all my experience, I’ve never been as worried about our energy security as I am now. Like many of us, I ignored what was happening. Now our country faces what I believe is the most serious situation since World War II.
The problem, of course, is our growing dependence on foreign oil – it’s extreme, it’s dangerous, and it threatens the future of our nation.
Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.
This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world’s oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world’s reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.
In fact, if we don’t do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history.
Why do I believe that our dependence on foreign oil is such a danger to our country? Put simply, our economic engine is now 70% dependent on the energy resources of other countries, their good judgment, and most importantly, their good will toward us. Foreign oil is at the intersection of America’s three most important issues: the economy, the environment and our national security. We need an energy plan that maps out how we’re going to work our way out of this mess. I think I have such a plan.
…We’ll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the “Saudi Arabia of the Wind”? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker.
My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.
I believe this plan will be the perfect bridge to the future, affording us the time to develop new technologies and a new perspective on our energy use. In addition to the plan I have proposed, I also want to see us explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation. Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well, as we need to look at all options, recognizing that there is no silver bullet.
I believe my plan can be accomplished within 10 years if this country takes decisive and bold steps immediately. This plan dramatically reduces our dependence on foreign oil and lowers the cost of transportation. It invests in the heartland, creating thousands of new jobs. It substantially reduces America’s carbon footprint and uses existing, proven technology. It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation. It will build a bridge to the future, giving us the time to develop new technologies.
Read the whole thing. Visit Mr. Pickens’s website here.
July 9th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Apparently Pickens hasn’t learned, in his 80 years, what the biggest problem with relying on wind power is. This “plan” is not anything new.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Throw Picken’s plan in with lots of other good plans, and we’ll work our way out of this mess.
What we don’t need is a bunch of naysayers, and a Democratic Congress who are a bunch of idiots.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Looks too simple to me, but I think McCain should quickly move to endorse this plan of action. A lot of people are going to be backing this plan after Picken’s ad buys.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Wind power is definitely a good source, but certainly not a panacea. We need to drill, develop wind, solar, and wave resources, and conserve like crazy.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Part of the bigger picture, which is how he presents it. I appreciate this a lot- for those of us conservatives who aren’t wacko environmentalists, but who don’t buy into the Limbaugh shrug off either. A good first step.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Mr. Pickens for VP? In all seriousness, Senator McCain does need to support this plan. Energy is an issue that we must deal with whether we like it or not.
Short term:
Domestic drilling for oil
Cleaner coal
Long term:
Increased natural gas production.
Wind
Solar
More nuclear plants for electricity - ie gradually replace coal.
Not only are the new energy sources cleaner and more reliable, many of them are available in areas of the country which are in need of economic rehabilitation. These technologies will create jobs.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Lets do it. Why dont we elect this guy?
July 9th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
The problem with wind power is that it is so intermittent and unreliable (the power grid has capacity for transmission only, not storage), that coal, gas, or nuclear power plants must be running concurrently to make up for any “dead time” due to low wind resources. It’s not easy or efficient to switch fossil fuel or nuclear generation on and off, so these extra sources must be running all the time anyway. The wind power is really only a “bonus” on top of the other generation then, and can’t be used as a sole source. In order to use wind exclusively, some storage mechanism must bee devised. Hydrogen production and storage during high wind might be one way, but the number of energy transformations would decrease efficiency, so far more wind turbines would be needed. Probably a factor of 4-10 times is my guess.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
anyone know how much a natural gas-powered car costs?
July 9th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
The French are the worldwide leaders in nuclear power *purges bad taste from mouth*. How quickly can they get a nuclear plant up and running?
July 9th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Westinghouse began building power plants in China in December of 2007 and it will go online in 2012. So i’m not understanding why it will take so long to get plants up and running.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Pickens for VP? Had that thought a few months ago, and it would be a fantastic idea, except he’s 80 years old.
Ironically, as I was typing the previous sentence, he appeared on FoxNews in a commercial pushing his plan.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I have always had a tremendous amount of respect for Mr. Pickens and I am glad to see him advocating his energy plans. He has been in the news before. You might remember that he funded the airlift operation to rescue pets from New Orleans. If you attend a football game at Oklahoma State University, you will be sitting in Boone Pickens Stadium. Regardless of who wins the Presidential Election, Mr. Pickens would be a great advisor (either formal or informal) on energy.
Metro #12 - Yes his age might be a liability for VP, but he might be the right guy for the job.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Crunching some numbers…
A natural gas powered Civic costs 25,000. And you cant really buy them either since they are so limited in production. A normal civic is 15,000. Natural gas will cost you 8 cents per mile vs. 13 cents per mile on a normal Civic. So you’d have to drive your natural gas car 200,000 miles before you broke even. Invest that the extra 10,000 you’d save from buying a civic and both cars would break before you’d see any savings with natural gas. And as I already pointed out, nuclear plants are far quicker to build than Pichens would have us believe. Pitchens just has too many holes in his sales pitch for me.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
I saw Pickens on his commerical on Fox News as well. However, to be straight-forward, he fails to indicate the massive oil reserves that are located within the U.S. mainland & offshore. Also, I do not know whether he is for nucs and he fails to indicate the failures of wind power and that people have been against wind power in their “backyards”.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE4DB1F3DF931A3575AC0A9619C8B63
July 9th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Screw those giant migratory-bird-killing turbines that only turn when the wind decides to blow unless we hoist them aloft to capture the jet stream. And screw turning the entire prairie region into a giant solar panel mounted on a swivel-pivot to follow the sun like a massive sun flower. And screw crowding up our beaches and harbors with up-and-down-moving bouncy-floats to capture motion of wave and tide. I want those 45 new nuclear reactors that Sen. McCain proposed and I want them yesterday. Then we can make our own wind.
It only takes about 4 years from the laying of a keel to the launch of a nuclear submarine into the blue waters of the open ocean. And the Navy has a nearly flawless safety record with its nuclear powered vessels. Oh, they’ve lost entire submarines—the ill-fated Scorpion springs to mind—but they’ve never had a nuclear mishap, unlike our Russian brothers and sisters.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I have many points to add to that have been touched on already.
Big S is completely right about wind power being unreliable. There are several studies out on the usage of wind power on a larger scale, and they all generally agree that 20% is the limit on its contribution. You can’t have so much wind plants contributing base power to the grid - if the wind stops (like it did a couple years back down in Texas), you get screwed and end up scrambling to get the extra power you need NOW. There is no way to store energy on the power grid (again, as Big S said), so wind cannot be so heavily relied on. While I would like to see wind power take a larger stake than it has right now, 22% from Pickens’ Plan is a bit too unreal.
Also, on the length of the construction of a nuclear power plant: the largest hurdle right now to constructing them is filing an application with the NRC. IIRC, there is a 4 year or so backlog on applications, so power companies who are now starting to file new apps to begin the process of analyzing whether or not to add a plant have to wait several years on an answer. Deal with the NRC issues, and plants get built much faster…
July 10th, 2008 at 2:20 am
Wind IS unreliable but that doesnt mean it is unworkable. Here’s a simple way it can be made dependable: Pair a wind energy field with pumped hydro storage (thats pumping water to an uphill resevoir during periods of excess winds and run it downhill when you DO need it. On an efficiency level, I’ve heard of rates between 70-80%. Thats not bad, though you need some topography to make this work. (Not so easy on the flat plains). Plus since the resevoirs are not on a river or stream, you dont run into the same environmental complaints when you dam a conventional watercourse.
This of course deals with electricity and oil is the pressing problem. The other part of the solution is the electrification of our transportation network (land based). We’ve already come a long way in this front and on the shelf technology ALREADY exists to totally run the first 20-40 miles of any trip on electricity before needing a recharge (plug in or on-board gas turbine generator). Most trips are less than 40. With further vehicle improvements along with rebuilding this nation’s passenger and freight rail system we could totally beat that oil addiction.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
There is a public Forum for discussions about Pickens plan :
http://www.pickensenergyplan.com
Cheers.