DENVER — T. Boone Pickens ranks 117 on the Forbes Magazine list of the 400 richest Americans. None of the 116 people who are wealthier, though, are attracting the white hot glare of the media and the political class as the Texas oilman. On July 8, Pickens introduced his self-named energy plan to scale up solar and wind energy to generate electricity, build a new renewable energy transmission network, and use natural gas to fuel the transportation sector and cut oil imports 38 percent within a decade. 

The day after he introduced the Pickens Plan, a member of Pickens’ staff contacted the Apollo Alliance asking for our support. We sought a meeting to begin a conversation that could be useful to both parties. This morning in Denver, in a conference room inside the Alliance Center, one of the greenest and most energy efficient buildings in the country, the Apollo Alliance’s Jerome Ringo, Kate Gordon, and Richard Eidlin (see pix above) sat down with Pickens and a few of his staff.

“There are parallels in your vision and in our vision for a clean energy future,” Jerome started. “How do we put the two together?”  

“We’ve relied on and agreed with most everything Apollo says,” Pickens replied. “Imagine with me a minute. Imagine we rebuild the whole deal with clean energy. We’re sending $700 billion a year out of this country for foreign oil. Imagine cutting that in half. The generation that’s coming. That’s what this is about.”

Since introducing his energy plan Pickens has held lots of meetings with an A list of players in the political, media, and business sectors. He sat down with President Bush, Senator John McCain, Senator Barack Obama, Al Gore, Warren Buffet, and many others. He tells them essentially the same thing.

The United States, which is confronting an economic and jobs crisis tied to the rising price of oil, is heading to financial collapse unless we pursue new policy, technology, and new renewable and clean energy sources to replace foreign oil. In the early 1990s at the start of the Gulf War, Pickens reminds listeners, the United States imported 48 percent of its oil. Pickens predicted then that by the end of the decade, unless energy policy changed, the U.S. would import 60 percent.

Now it’s 70 percent. Within a decade, if nothing changes, he predicts the price of oil will top $700 a barrel. The cost to the American economy, he says: well over $2 trillion a year spent on foreign oil.

“We can’t drill our way out of this problem,” he told us today. “There is just no way to do that.”

We asked Pickens for help in making this case to the Republican leadership, which is pursuing a “drill here, drill now” strategy that has absolutely no chance of working, short or long-term. We asked whether he was interested in collaborating to bring the clean energy, good jobs message to his friends in the G.O.P. The Apollo Alliance, a non-partisan organization, has not been nearly as successful recruiting Republican supporters as we need to. 

In the most telling moment of our time together, Pickens paused a moment and then related this story. Within the last few weeks, he said, he’d met with 40 Republican U.S. Senators, several of them personal friends. He explained that the country can not drill its way out of the energy crisis. The global demand for oil, now 85 million barrels a day, is rising faster than the supply. Moreover, as oil fields deplete, it is becoming harder and harder to maintain that 85 million barrel-per-day level. Yet some energy agencies predict that the U.S. demand — now 21 million barrels per day — when combined with global demand will require 125 million barrels per day within a decade or so. In order to keep up under the current supply and use scenario, global oil companies have to develop new supplies each year that add the equivalent of 5 million more barrels per day to the global supply.

“It ain’t gonna happen,” he said. He noted that the Department of the Interior recently offered for lease new offshore drilling regions in the Gulf of Mexico, and under 5 percent of the available leases attracted bids. Reason. The energy development companies aren’t confident there’s much new oil left to find in the Gulf, which is the major domestic offshore exploration zone. The “drill here, drill now” message of the Republican presidential campaign has certainly made an impression on Americans, he said, but it has no place in the reality of solving the energy crisis.

“We can’t drill our way out of this crisis,” he repeated. “I told those Senators the same thing and one of them turned to me and said, ‘You can’t say that. You need to stop saying that.’ I told him, “I can say what I want because it’s true.”

The facet of the Pickens Plan that differs from our New Apollo Program is its reliance on natural gas as a “bridge fuel” principally to power trucks, which use 30 percent of the nation’s transportation fuel. His idea is that wind power can replace the natural gas burned to produce electricity. By shifting the fuel over to transportation, Pickens contends that would replace 38 percent of oil imports within a decade.

Kate assured Pickens that we would carefully consider his approach with our Alliance members and supporters, among them the most influential labor, environmental, business, and social justice organizations in the country. In response to our request for his endorsement of The New Apollo Program, and to work together, he said he could not do that. “I need to be independent,” he said. “Otherwise I have no influence.”

On that last point he’s wrong. Pickens possesses an engaging personal style, a keen understanding of the energy sector, a healthy helping of humility, and certainly the financial resources to be taken seriously. If all he wants from the Pickens Plan — and the more than $50 million he says he’s spending to promote it — is to serve a public education need, that’s fine.

But if he wants to achieve reductions in foreign oil imports, that takes new policy and a huge and mobilized core of supporters. Pickens may be expert in the ways of the oil industry. He comes across as a neophyte in the world of policy. He needs allies and friends he can count on, and who can count on him. The Apollo Alliance, which has significant communications, coalition building, research, and strategic assets in the clean energy, good jobs sector today told Pickens it was interested in that kind of relationship. 

– Keith Schneider

Tags: natural gas, New Energy for America, Pickens Plan, Wind power

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Energy Independence, Green-Collar Jobs, National Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.