It’s Not All About Philanthropy With T. Boone
As T. Boone Pickens gets set to do the town hall thing this afternoon in Rapid City to promote his wind energy plan, we should be reminded that it’s not all about doing the right thing with T. Boone. The billionaire oilman who up until now was probably best known for his $1 million prize for anyone that could disprove anything his $3 million donation bought in the Swiftboating of John Kerry and then pulling it back when someone did, has a lot to gain monetarily if his energy plan is implemented.
What could an oilman gain by reducing our dependence on oil other than feeling good? To figure that out you need to know where that oilman currently has his money invested. In Pickens’ case that would be in natural gas and emerging technology hedge funds as well as wind energy companies that would see big returns if T. Boone’s plan goes forward. You see, any energy gained from wind power, much of which would be generated by Pickens’ Mesa Power, would free up more natural gas for use in other places which in the T. Boone plan would be as fuel in the next generation of automobiles.
Pickens said that the United States could generate at least 20 percent of its electricity by tapping power from the nation’s “wind corridor,” a vast stretch of territory from west Texas to the Canadian border.
That would then enable the nation’s abundant natural gas resources, now widely used to generate electricity, to be used for powering transportation. American automobile manufacturers should dramatically ramp up natural gas-powered vehicles, he said, and government vehicle fleets should be powered exclusively on natural gas.
So while under Pickens’ plan we would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to $230 billion a year (according to Pickens), that dependence would be replaced by a larger dependence on natural gas and who will be sitting there waiting for the money to roll in?
I am more than willing to give Mr. Pickens credit for trying to solve the problem of oil dependence especially being from a so called “wind corridor” state that will directly benefit from his plan. But the next time you see one of his feel good commercials, remember it not all about doing what’s best for the country, it’s about doing what’s best for T. Boone which this time just might benefit the country. More than enough to make any self respecting Republican proud.
Mr Schwartz’s mentality is exactly the reason this country is in the pickle it’s in. Mr Pickens doesn’t need more billions, and if he can lead this country out of this mess he deserves more billions. It’s jerks like Schwartz’s who have NO plan, NO solution and little interest in the future of the country who write this stuff. The country is getting behind the Pickens plan despite A holes like this guy.
The only hypocrisy here is this writers ability to enjoy the freedoms of this country while condemning ideas and those that present them that might help ensure that freedom. The country is sick of people like you.
Randy Nelson
Randy,
First off I said his plan could very well be good for America but that it was definitely good for Pickens so maybe you should read what was written before spewing unfounded insults.
With that said and insults aside, if there is anything incorrect with what is written please feel free to correct me but be prepared to source it.
I say who cares if T.Boone Pickens stands to make out here. Last time I checked this was still America and capitalism is still the name of the game. At least he has come up with a plan that seems to be viable. It is going to take somebody of Pickens wealth to be be able to push a energy policy change of this magnitude and get it to the american people.
Karl M. Dickinson
Who cares how much money T. Boone Picken makes off of this. The point is to keep the money in circulation here not there or somewhere else. Why give it to a Russian oil company or Middle East oil company. I for sure don’t want ot going to Chavez down South
I agree, if he’s smart enough to visulize the plan, and willing to finacially make risks that would help make forgein dependancy end, why not make a buck at it as well. This has me thinking on the same terms. Capitalism is what founded this country, based that those who truely thought about the future, and invested in that future, would be the ones making the $. We should all be so smart…
Mr. Pickens is 80 years old and already has excessively more money than he will ever be able to spend. Believe it or not, there are some things that people care about, that don’t directly effect their wallets. Things like having clean air for their grand children to breathe. It is the mentality of this author that makes it hard for anyone to do “the right thing” because there is always someone to criticize their motives or actions.
My name is Larry M. Aden, 2694 180th Street, Nemaha, Iowa 50567, 712-636-4490, lmaden@frontiernet.net
I am not a blind supporter of Pickens’ Plan, but would love to be convinced.
I spoke with Boone at the LeMars, Iowa Townhall, but he did not provide any specifics about his plan, nor seem to be very amenable to tweeking that which we do know about his plan to make it work for anybody but Boone, nor did he want the ‘little people’ to know what is problematical about his plan.
I submit the following post on PickensPlan to help you understand my position:
Local non-partisan action is the best way for us to progress in this struggle!
Natural Gas (NG) serves best in large urban areas where access is universal, driving distances are shorter, and its cleaner burning yields maximum benefit.
If we concentrate on big cities first, we can thus make the greatest improvement for the greatest number in the shortest time.
In this political duopoly, our two major parties have always been more of a hindrance than a help to getting the People’s business done.
If we look back at our Founding Fathers for guidance, we see that both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were adamantly opposed to organized political parties, and the word ‘party’ does not occur once in our beloved Constitution!
If we want to progress on energy, or anything of import, we must ban all parties from ballot access, so all ideas have equal access, and the voter must vote for the candidate, not the party.
I posted the below on other blogs to help us better understand the energy problems we all face:
Compressed Natural Gas (CNG, mostly CH4) is much cheaper and slightly cleaner than Liquid Propane Gas (LPG, or C3H8), kits for conversion of autos to CNG, LPG, Butane (LBG, or C4H10), or Hydrogen (H2) are virtually identical except for orifice size, but only LPG kits are widely available, and cheap enough to warrant converting.
No kits, that I know of, are designed to change automatically from one fuel to another on the go, as they well should be.
NG will not remain cheap, if substantial conversion of our transportation sector to CNG occurs without equal increases in production of NG its component, methane (CH4), from biogas, or other gases from every possible source.
We also unsustainably consume increasingly huge amounts of NG making Anhydrous Ammonia (NH3) and other industrial gases that could be more cheaply and sustainably made by electrolysis of water (H2O) and cryogenic distillation of air!
President Bush has been absolutely right in pushing for H2 in every budget he has proposed for the last several years, but nobody listens to him, because he is just “an oil man”.
Hydrogen (H2) is the answer and is not expensive to make if we use wind energy and other cheap off-peak electrical power during the nighttime to produce it by electrolysis from water.
This relatively-efficient, low-tech solution is over 100 years old, infinitely renewable, totally carbon neutral and more profitable than reforming CH4 from NG, as two pure industrial gases are produced - Hydrogen and Oxygen (O2)!
H2 can also be metered into the mix in our buried low-pressure NG pipelines at any point where it is produced, eliminating the problems in H2 distribution and the need for huge electrical transmission lines from our wind farms.
Below is an in-depth Letter to the Editor in a series that I had published:
COMMON SENSE ON ENERGY, NOW!!!, Part II
I wanted to discuss how we should make use of wasted local energy resources like that biogas flame at the sewage plant and the algae from Storm Lake for bio-fuels, but the nitwits are attacking on other fronts, so I must rush to the ramparts.
This won’t be short, so if you would rather not learn anything today, or you don’t want your present world view to be confused by the facts, stop reading, now!
I am often fond of saying that God created every person with a special talent and their own little piece of the truth. The real trick is in finding each persons talent to employ them to their fullest, and to recognize their little piece of the truth, so that we can put it in its proper place in the jigsaw puzzle of life to recreate that picture of eternal bliss in the Garden of Eden. Sadly, not every living being is willing to lend their talent and their knowledge to this quest. For this reason, we all continue to suffer.
Texas oil man, T. Boone Pickens, whose talent seems to be making money for himself, made over $1Billion speculating in oil and gas in 2005, again in 2006, $1.5B in 2007, was earlier estimated to be worth $3 Billion, but has since been instrumental in pushing crude oil beyond reason with his very public pronouncements that “oil is going to $150”.
It is now hovering around $145 as he quietly sells the barrels he bought at $50, after all, he’s not greedy; he doesn’t have to have every penny of that $150!
Whenever you hear a speculator say one thing, you should run the other direction!
Just like when George Soros caused the devaluation of the US Dollar, when he announced to the world that he was getting out of Dollars and buying Euros. That should have been interpreted by all of us that Soros had already sold all of his Dollars and bought all the Euros he could buy. He went public, because he wanted everyone else to do the same, so he could get out of Euros near their high and buy Dollars cheap.
Because Soros is rich, every fool listens to him. All the lemmings bit on this one, and rushed to dump their Dollars, stressing our economy and raising the price of food, fuel and everything we buy in the process. George only wants money and a Dem elected President, and he doesn’t care who he has to hurt to get it!
Paraphrasing Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, “If you mix a big lie in with a little truth, and tell it often enough, you can convince everyone it is the truth.”
That is what T. Boone is doing with his very expensive TV ad campaign touting PickensPlan.com to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Everything he has to say about the harm buying foreign oil is doing to our economy is absolutely true. That we should use more of our own CNG (compressed natural gas) for our autos is also true, and absolutely achievable with technology we have had for decades. That we should make more use of wind and solar energy, of course, but, that we can take Natural Gas (NG) away from electrical generation and replace that with wind and solar power shows he is either extremely ignorant of the fundamental facts about electricity, or he is trying to pull the wool over our eyes for his own profit!
Call me cynical, but I am betting on the latter, as recently, Pickens has heavily invested the profits of his oil speculation into both wind and natural gas!
He has also invested heavily in water rights, what should that tell us about what ‘shortage’ might develop next?
I am all for anyone making money, just do it honestly, without hurting your fellow man in the process, always giving your trading partners equal fair market value.
To see why Pickens’ Plan is not perfectly honest and achievable, we need to understand our energy consuming habits and needs.
Electrical power providers categorize our energy demand as 3 types of “load” – base, intermediate, and peak.
“Base load” is the minimum level of electrical power consumption at any one moment throughout any hour of every day of the year. This is constant demand and requires constant generating capacity, as alternating current cannot be stored, it must be used at the moment it is generated. They use hydroelectric, nuclear, and coal-fired steam turbine generating plants to provide this power, as these are cheap, constant and dependable, but cannot be started and stopped quickly to meet new load.
Geothermal, ocean thermal, offshore wind, wave, and ocean current energy could also be used for this load, and these represent the only safe and inexhaustible supply of renewable energy available to us to address ‘base load’. Why does no one even mention them in this debate on what we should do about energy? Why should we build nuclear plants when we haven’t even sunk one turbine in the Gulf Stream, yet?
“Intermediate load” is the demand that increases from 6AM, when the world starts to stir, to 9PM, when it starts to wind down, getting ready for bed. This happens like clock work every day, regardless of the weather, it can be planned for, so they fire the boilers in those coal-fired plants, a little harder, a little ahead of time, to bring more steam turbine generators on-line, or open another gate on a hydroelectric dam, when you and I want to shower and go to work.
“Peak load” is different every day of every season, depending heavily upon the weather and variable human activity. It is normally between 12 Noon and 4PM, with space heating and air conditioning being the greatest variable in demand. This demand changes rapidly and requires instantaneous response in generating capacity from hot gas turbines, which burn NG. There is no alternative to this gas, except other more expensive gases. If we take this NG from electric companies, we will be constantly plagued with brownouts and blackouts, or see massive increases in the price of our power and fuel, or both.
Wind cannot replace this power, in fact, our need for NG in electrical generation will actually increase with increased dependence on the fickle wind, as it almost never comes when we really need it. Most of the best wind comes at night, when we do not need it at all. The power companies really hate to be forced to buy wind power for 3.5cts/Kwh while shutting down coal-fired generation that costs them 1ct/Kwh. Who could blame them? Likewise, where the best wind comes, from West Texas to North Dakota, we do not have the necessary transmission lines, because there are few people living there to serve this power to.
High tension interstate transmission lines are very expensive, and very intrusive! Nobody wants these monstrosities built in their back yard!
What we could, and should, do is hook every alternative energy source we can find to a local load that matches it.
Solar photoelectric energy is a good match for air conditioning, refrigeration, and water pumping. Demand for these always increases when the sun shines, perfect match! It is expensive, inefficient, and nearly useless for anything else. Solar heating is little better, but should be passively designed into every new building.
Wind is a great match for space heating, water pumping, battery charging and other automated industrial processes that can be run when the wind blows, and shut off when it doesn’t, such as cryogenic distillation of air, hydrogen electrolysis, anhydrous ammonia (NH3) production, and other industrial gas production from these processes.
Huge quantities of our precious NG are spent senselessly in manufacturing NH3 for fertilizer, when it has long been cheaper to return to the original carbon-neutral, and infinitely renewable process of making it from water and air.
We must rewrite the REA charter to cover all forms of rural energy distribution, empower local REC’s to fund, sell and maintain distributed generation systems for their members, and to empower those members to sell all forms of energy directly back.
Then, we must erect wind and water current turbines everywhere we can possibly put them, thousands of big ones, and millions of smaller ones between them, that we manufacture here (not expensive imports). Each can be wired into our present electrical grid without building new transmission lines. Then, we must hook each to a water electrolyzer, and a booster pump, to store the off-peak energy as Hydrogen gas (H2), putting this, along with methane (CH4) from our every hog house, poultry house, cattle feedlot, and sewage plant, into the local low-pressure NG pipelines that serve our houses, farms and industries. Underground low-pressure NG pipelines are cheap and innocuous.
NG, mostly CH4, the very same biogas produced by every marsh, cow stomach, and manure pit, is compatible with both gasoline and diesel engines, and is perfectly interchangeable with propane, butane, and Hydrogen in low pressure gas systems (<300psi). These gases are extremely clean burning and can be used interchangeably in any gasoline motor with a truly flex-fuel system having an adjustable orifice.
H2 and CH4 are perfectly compatible, clean, safe and infinitely renewable; they also store well and liquefy under comparable conditions, but only at very high pressures (5400psi), or very low temperatures (-253C). CNG is normally packed at 3000psi for auto fuel, which is too high to be compatible with other gases, and too low to liquefy.
So, we should standardize compressed gas auto fuel storage pressure with liquid propane gas (LPG) at 300psi, then, use LPG, ethanol, or gasoline, only for long trips, and NG for our every day commutes.
With a small pump, we could all fill our cars and tractors at home from our own NG/H2 pipeline meter for about a Dollar per gallon gasoline equivalent!
When Pickens wants us to do that, I’ll support him, 100%!