Replacing Oil Blog

T. Boone Pickens has already met personally with both presidential candidates to discuss the Pickens Plan. For those of you yet unfamiliar with the plan the main points are 1. replace natural gas used for electricity production with wind turbines and 2. use natural gas for transportation. It is a solid, well thought out plan that can save America hundreds of billions on foreign oil imports.

One of the main points T. Boone discussed with Sarah Palin was the huge impact alone that could be made by converting over the road trucks to run on natural gas instead of diesel. Simply converting one million trucks to natural gas would reduce our imports of foreign diesel by 40%.

Boone says he spoke with Palin for nearly an hour, but she of course gave no commitment. She appeared impressed that the Pickens Plan has nearly reached it’s goal of 1,000,000 supporters. I’m surprised she wasn’t more enthusiastic about the project to replace oil with natural gas. After all Palin’s pipeline project sounds like it needs all the help it can get!

While Replacing Oil would like to see us move entirely away from fossil fuels altogether we are a big supporter of the Pickens Plan for one very important reason. It’s is the only plan that can significantly reduce America’s dependance on foreign oil quickly. Allow T.Boone himself to elaborate:

The Pickens Plan to shuffle our resource usage in order to free America from it’s addiction to foreign oil is picking up steam. Now with over a million members it’s got some political power as well.

T. Boone has recently met with both presidential candidates about the plan. They have no choice now, but to take the former oilman seriously. Energy policy is a huge issue this election and the Pickens Plan website has over 4 million visitors. They’ve got to act interested!

Not only do the candidates take the plan seriously, a national poll shows that most (almost three quarters) Americans believe that it’s possible to completely cut dependance on foreign oil within 10 years. Interesting enough though most Americans have no faith in COngress or the Senate to allow the plan to succeed. Shocking.

I love NYTimes op-ed sometimes. After dubbing to Israeli visionary Shai Agassi as “The Jewish Henry Ford” Thomas L. Friedman heaps some well deserved praise for the efforts of “The Jewish Henry Ford” and the Pickens Plan’s efforts to loosen their respective countries from foreign oil dependence.

The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power.

Breifly, Shai Agassi is pushing a innovative electric car opperator network, called Project Better Place. The idea is to offer cheap, mass produced electric cars with a network of recharging outlets and even battery exchanges. Those services will be offered in scaled plans for consumers like your mobile phone company with distance instead of minutes. It’s catching on, Gordon Brown is pledging a few quid to make Britan “the European capital for electric cars.”

What about those of us that live in big countries?

T. Boone and the Pickens Plan, on the other hand, is firing at the same target with different ammunition. He too realizes that America’s $700 billion a year addiction to foreign oil is very large monkey to carry on our backs (it’s late, I can’t stop with the imagery). A nationwide electric car operator network as effective as the one proposed by Shia Agassi’s Project Better Place is just not going be an easy sell. He didn’t become a billionaire by ignoring straight economics in favor of lofty ideals.

In a nutshell, the Pickens Plan aims at adding a ton of energy created by enormous wind farms to electrical power grids. The added wind energy should then allow us to shift our ample natural gas resources away from electricity generation into transportation. Every time I think of Pickens and his plan I picture him smirking as he draws a cigar to his lips with his leather gloved hand and telling the nation how he loves it when a plan comes together.

True, natural gas is a fossil fuel that adds CO2 to the atmosphere, but it’s a lot cleaner and cheaper than gasoline. It’s also not so difficult to have existing cars fitted for CNG, at least not here in Thailand (where I’ve been residing for the last several years).

Here at Replacing Oil we think that hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles are the way forward. However, if I had to choose between the Pickens Plan very likely materializing during the Obama Administration or a hazy hydrogen future (despite it’s obvious posibility), I’ll take the Pickens Plan. He’s got enough money and political attention to nudge the lumbering behemouth that is America’s transportation system in the right directions. Just don’t expect Gordon Brown to discard their blossoming EV ambitions for Wind and Gas. The relationship just isn’t that special anymore.

Treehuggers step aside, saving the environment is now in the realm of bottom line huggers. I’ve been reading the Pickens Plan and it seems like billionaire oilman T. Boone is about to overshadow the combined efforts from decades of smelly hippies and eccentric pirates with a real strategy. He’s out to save America from it’s 700 billion dollar a year dependency on foreign oil, largely by taking advantage of the great plains state’s unique wind resources.

There’s something about being a billionaire that gets people to listen, perhaps the wads of cash bulging out from under his ten gallon hat. Honestly, I’ve never seen Pickens in a ten gallon hat, but It’s hard to imagine a Texas oilman in anything else. Even conservative columnist Cal Thomas is excited about his plan and it’s ability to bridige the divide between parties.

While we are a bigger fan of microgeneration than Pickens’ multi-billion dollar wind farms, we’re very excited here at Replacing Oil with the amount of attention being drawn to the botton line of alternative energy rexources in the United States. The great plains states have enough wind to churn out more power than all the oil off the shore of Florida (I really don’t have the numbers to back that up, but it sounds about right). From both economic and environmental perspectives wind farms are a very safe investment. Hopefully when Obama takes office in less than 6 months, we can quit banging our heads against the wall trying to get Washington to listen to reason.