NGI The Weekly Gas Market Report
NGI Archives | NGI All News Access
Pickens, Turner Push Support for Natural Gas
The United States may be the only major nation without an energy plan, but the proposed New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act (NAT GAS Act) could be the best current hope for filling this void, according to energy billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who spoke last Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, with a fellow billionaire and alternative energy advocate, CNN founder Ted Turner.
Pickens unabashedly touted his energy plan, which is centered on making natural gas a major transportation fuel and joined Turner in embracing renewables as a response to climate change. Former oilman Pickens said he has more recently come to embrace climate change as fervently as Turner, who in turn has come to appreciate natural gas as the nation’s “bridge fuel.”
Pickens said “cheap oil” is the root cause for the United States “never having an energy plan” for more than 40 years, going back to when then-President Richard Nixon promised to end the nation’s oil imports by 1980. Politically no one has wanted to tackle a national energy plan during the past four decades, but “it is time to tackle it now,” Pickens said.
In response to questions about hydraulic fracturing (fracking), Pickens said the complaints were overstated.
For his part, Turner expressed some concerns with fracking to the Washington, DC, crowd, but deferred to Pickens’ expertise on the subject, noting he is “an oilman and I am a television guy.” Pickens said he fracked his first well in the 1950s and went on to use the technology in more than 3,000 wells without any contamination of domestic water supplies or other environmental mishaps.
Pickens has a proprietary interest in gas as a transportation fuel as owner of Seal Beach, CA-based Clean Energy Fuels Corp. and has since 2008 pushed the “Pickens Plan” to cut America’s dependence on foreign oil by more than one-third within 10 years. The plan calls for shifting the nation to using domestic renewable sources and natural gas as a transportation fuel (see NGI, July 14, 2008), and the NAT GAS Act proposal that he supports would adopt elements of his plan (see NGI, April 11).
“If we continue for the next 10 years as we have for the past 40 years, we’ll be paying $300 or $400/bbl, and we’ll be importing 75% of our oil,” said Pickens, noting that the United States currently imports 66% of its oil.
Pickens emphasized natural gas price advantages as a transportation fuel, although he acknowledged there are added costs for infrastructure for fueling stations that also have to be factored in. One $4/Mcf of gas equals seven gallons of diesel for about $30, he said. “The only thing that is going to move an 18-wheel truck-trailer rig is diesel or natural gas; a battery won’t work. The only one we have that can move an 18-wheeler is natural gas.”
At $1.40/gallon of equivalent diesel, natural gas can eventually make it on its own, but Pickens wants the NAT GAS legislation to provide some national direction. He said the nation can convert its approximately eight million 18-wheel long-haul trucks to run on natural gas “with a little help,” which is categorized as $5 billion for federal funds spread over the next five years to subsidize the truck conversions.
“I want a billion dollars a year for five years and then kill [the subsidy] ,” Pickens said. “The program would sunset after that.” He is asking the Obama administration for billions to get the transportation conversion started. “Just give us the direction and we will get started,” he said. “All of this is going to happen.”
The business sector will build the fueling infrastructure, and government does not have to get involved, Pickens said.
In response to a question about a Cornell University report alleging that gas fracking may result in more greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal in power plants (see NGI, April 18), Pickens said there is no question about the relative cleanliness of natural gas, calling it the “fuel that cleaned up California” through the conversion of buses, trash trucks and other heavy equipment from diesel to natural gas as a fuel.
On broader climate change issues, Turner called the environmental situation “life-or-death” for the planet, saying he viewed natural gas as a “bridge” fuel.
“In 20 years there will be no fossil fuel,” said Turner, who predicts cars will run on electricity in 20 years. “We need renewable energy for a world without pollution, so kids won’t get asthma.”
Turner sees nuclear weapons as “the greatest threat to the survival of the human race.” The second greatest threat he said was overpopulation, with the oceans overfished and the land overfarmed and a billion people out of the seven billion world population today starving.
The third greatest threat to human survival is the environment. Turner said he is looking forward to a “world without pollution.” Either we achieve that world “or we aren’t going to live that long. Either we’re going to do it or we’re going to die. It’s very simple.”
Pickens said he now agrees with Turner about the dangers of global warming. He didn’t agree 10 years ago, but he does now since he has watched the ice caps and glaciers melt.
©Copyright 2011Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. The preceding news reportmay not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in anyform, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.
© 2024 Natural Gas Intelligence. All rights reserved.
ISSN © 2577-9877 | ISSN © 1532-1266 |