Posted Jul 11, 2008, 11:09 AM
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My Mind Has Left My Body
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Posts: 3,357
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Oilman sees a shift in the wind
Saw another article about this guys proposal a few months ago around here but don't know where it went. Sorry if this is wrong section.....
Quote:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,5676645.story
Oilman sees a shift in the wind
Ex-corporate raider T. Boone Pickens is pushing for $1 trillion investment to lessen need for foreign oil
By David Greising | Chicago Tribune correspondent
11:45 PM CDT, July 9, 2008
T. Boone Pickens made his name tilting at windmills—trying in the 1980s to buy oil companies that didn't want to be bought—and now he has turned to building windmills on a parched patch of Texas scrubland instead.
True to form, though, former corporate raider Pickens cannot resist taking on a daunting crusade worthy of Don Quixote: Trying to convince the country that the government and private investors should spend $1 trillion over 20 years to erect thousands more windmills in hopes of cutting U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Billions more, he knows, would be needed to build transmission lines to carry the wind power across the country.
The bullwhip in Pickens' hand is the $58 million he has budgeted to promote his ideas and make energy security a top issue in the presidential campaign. With oil selling around $140 a barrel, he said, the U.S. sends $700 billion a year to other countries.
"You've got the largest shift of money in the history of mankind," Pickens said in his languid Texas drawl. "I don't know whether it's either naive, weak, stupid or whatever, but we have drifted, drifted, drifted, where we're now importing almost 70 percent of our oil."
Barack Obama proposes investing $150 billion in developing new energy technology over the next 10 years. John McCain wants to build 45 new nuclear plants and is offering a $300 million reward to the inventor of a new battery that could power a car.
Pickens scoffs at the proposals.
"These candidates do not understand the question. They don't understand how critical this all is," Pickens said Wednesday in an interview with the Tribune's editorial board.
Pickens has made a career of telling people in power that they are coming up short. In the 1980s he used his relatively tiny Mesa Petroleum to launch ultimately unsuccessful takeover bids for Gulf Oil and Phillips Petroleum, making many millions when they were sold to higher bidders.
Since then Pickens watchers have learned to ask what's in it for Boone whenever he mounts a new crusade.
"I do like the nerve of this Texas oilman saying, 'We're out of oil, now let's do wind,' " said Thomas "Smitty" Smith, director of Texas operations for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "Part of this play is to create his legacy. It's also a part of his strategy to fill his own pocketbook."
$2 billion invested
Billionaire Pickens' pocketbook could benefit from a sizable public investment in a nationwide transmission network he proposes for wind power. His Mesa Power has invested $2 billion in a wind farm in the Texas panhandle northeast of Amarillo. The record purchase of 685 turbines from General Electric Co. produces enough electricity to power 300,000 U.S. homes. Pickens has plans to spend $10 billion by 2011 on capacity roughly equal to four modern nuclear plants.
The electricity will make its way to Dallas or San Antonio along the route of another project, a water pipeline. Pickens' Mesa Water owns the right to draw 65 billion gallons a year from beneath Texas scrubland and move it, alongside his wind-produced power, some 250 miles toward north-central Texas.
And Pickens' argument that wind should replace natural gas as a source of 22 percent of the nation's electricity dovetails with his Clean Fuel Technologies, the largest operator of natural gas fueling stations for vehicles.
Pickens says he is not in this push just for the money.
"I'm doing something I want to do because I think it's the right thing to do," Pickens said. "Let's get rid of the question that this is some way Boone Pickens is trying to make money. That's not true."
People should see his personal investment as proof that he is committed financially to the ideas he is promoting, Pickens said.
"What I'm doing, I'm doing for this country," he added.
And he's doing it, as the 80-year-old Pickens does most things, in a big way.
Born in Oklahoma and trained as a petroleum geologist, Pickens built Mesa Petroleum into the nation's largest independent oil driller before transforming it into a takeover vehicle in the 1980s. He eventually lost control of Mesa, and he has acknowledged seeking medical help for depression during the late 1990s.
Discussed with Bush
A lifelong Republican who knew a young George H.W. Bush as a fellow wildcatter, Pickens twice seriously considered running for governor of Texas. He is close enough to President George W. Bush that Pickens recently spent an hour at the White House briefing the president on his "PickensPlan" to promote energy independence.
So far, though, the PickensPlan is more Pickens than plan. He has blitzed the television airwaves touting his ideas, but seems to lack specifics.
In the Tribune interview, Pickens offered maps of a proposed transmission network, but no details about the cost. Only when a reporter offers up some cost estimates does Pickens acknowledge that the wind power alone would cost $1 trillion to build.
Experts on the energy challenge caution against relying too much on wind.
Judi Greenwald, director of innovation solutions for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said biofuels, new battery technologies and other options might prove more feasible.
"There's only so much wind we can accommodate right now because of the [power] storage issue and the transmission issue," she said.
Pickens said he is willing to consider other options. "We need a plan," he said. "A fool with a plan beats a genius with no plan. And we have been almost a fool with no plan."
dgreising@tribune.com
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