Ex-oilman T. Boone Pickens has a bold plan to reduce America's foreign oil imports by one-third in ten years. Pickens is determined to make the plan a campaign and the major part of the next President's first 100 day agenda. The plan is simple and bold enough to succeed – if we are and our political leaders are bold enough to implement it or something reasonably like it.
The elevator speech from the newly launched (ning-based) social website www.pickensplan.com is this:
"America is blessed with the world's greatest wind power corridor and abundant reserves of clean natural gas. The Pickens Plan will utilize these tremendous resources to build a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives and buying time for us to develop even greater new technologies.
"The Plan calls for building new wind generation facilities that will produce 20% of our nation's electricity and allow us to use natural gas as a transportation fuel. The combination of these domestic energies can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. And we can do it all in 10 years".
Right now we use natural gas to generate electricity – especially at peak times. If most of this natural gas can be displaced by wind-power as an electricity source, it can then be used as fuel for cars and trucks displacing diesel fuel and gasoline made from imported oil. There are seven million natural gas vehicles on the road today worldwide(According to NGVAmerica); and the switchover from gasoline to natural gas would be much easier and cheaper for the auto industry than a switch to electric vehicles (which I believe will happen eventually). There are already some natural gas fueling stations in operation including one in Burlington, VT (see map for a station near you); but obviously there's have to be a massive conversion of existing gas stations.
If the wind doesn't blow on a particular day, we would presumably continue to use some of the existing natural gas facilities to generate replacement power.
Pickens estimates the capital cost of his plan to build windmills from North Dakota to Texas (America's wind corridor) at about a trillion dollars plus another $200 billion or so to upgrade the transmission grid to take the electricity from the wind corridor to the rest of the country. Big numbers but not compared to the $700 billion dollars worth of oil and oil products we import annually. 97% of the natural gas we use today is from North America and Pickens isn't proposing that we use more NG, just that we use it differently. Great for both the economy and national security.
If reducing CO2 is your thing, this plan is for you. Remember, the plan is to burn only the amount of NG being burned today (and it is relatively low carbon and clean enough to burn indoors without a chimney). But we stop importing and burning a third of the oil we burn today. So the savings in emissions is everything that would have come out of the tailpipes of these cars before they were burning NG. BTW, the land under a windmill CAN continue to grow food crops.
There is a slight contradiction in the final paragraphs of Pickens' op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal:
"…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 [emphasis added] 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.
"The future begins as soon as Congress and the president act. The government must mandate the formation of wind and solar transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies [emphasis added] for economic and alternative energy development in areas where the wind and sun are abundant."
There is no question, though, that government will have to mandate the establishment of energy corridors AND assure that they are not blocked by NIMBY or an unwillingness to make environmental tradeoffs. And, since we're not about to repeal the subsidies and tax breaks for other forms of energy, we probably do need to subsidize the wind (hopefully only for a while).
If you support this plan or something like it, you can sign up as a supporter. I did.