Boone Pickens vs the G8 | Green Energy News

July 11, 2008 – Vol.13 No.16

BOONE PICKENS vs THE G8.

Iran has been launching missiles just for fun. They can reach Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and whomever else in the region with substantial warheads. The extraordinarily high oil revenues gushing into the country from around the world certainly haved helped the country build its missile program. The fundamentals of supply and demand have given the missile money to Iran. Oil supply is tight; no one is stepping on the brake pedal to slow demand. Iran’s missile games are pushing oil close to $150 a barrel.

The US – still the world’s largest user of oil – refuses to cut back or switch to alternatives. Drivers steadfastly won’t lighten up on the gas pedal even if it means saving themselves money or keeping the country from another war. Wimpish Washington, more concerned with votes in November, refuses to take immediate action to cut consumption like a return to a national speed limit. Instead Washington hopes that new oil supplied ten years from now will somehow slash prices today. (We’ll just sit by the road and wait, I guess.) And, US auto executives, refusing to read the signs on the wall of the past 35 years (the country needs dramatically more efficient cars or those than run on alternative fuels) still today won’t jump-start a crash program to develop a new generation of cars that doesn’t rely on imported oil.

T. Boone Pickens is right. We’re in an energy crisis. Seventy percent of our oil is imported the oil man says. Seven hundred billion dollars is exported each year never to return: That’s more than four times the cost of the Iraq war. He’s got his own plan to save us. He wants Washington and the rest of the country to listen.

The Pickens Plan, as he calls it and is now promoting, is to plant thousands of wind turbines in the nation’s “wind corridor” – a vast stretch of territory between West Texas and the Canadian border.

The wind energy would displace peak power generated with natural gas. The then available natural gas would become fuel for cars. The technology already exists to convert just about any car or truck to natural gas, but a fueling infrastructure needs to be built.

(Concentrated solar thermal power generation, now making a return, could also supplant natural gas burnt now at power plants.)

Natural gas, by the way, is considered a bridge fuel to hydrogen. Once an infrastructure is built to accommodate the storage and dispensing of both hydrogen and natural gas, over time the natural gas could be displaced with hydrogen generated with renewable energy.

Thomas Boone Pickens, Jr. is also wealthy natural gas and wind developer. Though still young at 80, profits from his own projects aren’t likely his number one concern. The country is.

Leaders of the G8 nations met in Japan this week and agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. No real plans were drawn up to do so. It’s just a limp handshake agreement with no muscle behind it. All of these leaders will be long out of office (and likely no longer around at all) by the time 2050 rolls around.

So the oil man from Texas at least has a plan and is promoting it on TV, the Internet and elsewhere. His plan would cut greenhouse gas emissions to some degree. The G8 agreement really does nothing.

One wonders why the G8 leaders spend tax payers’ money (and waste energy while producing greenhouse gases) to meet at some distant resort to accomplish what could be done in a conference call.

Links:

Pickens Plan
http://www.pickensplan.com