The Pickens Plan has always been about two key components: wind power and natural gas.
With our country’s Great Plains offering the richest untapped wind potential in the world, the first component is covered. But what about natural gas? How much does America have—and how long will it last? This article in Sunday’s New York Times helps shed some light on the answers.
American natural gas production is rising at a clip not seen in half a century, pushing down prices of the fuel and reversing conventional wisdom that domestic gas fields were in irreversible decline.
The new drilling boom uses advanced technology to release gas trapped in huge shale beds found throughout North America — gas long believed to be out of reach. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, releasing less of the emissions that cause global warming than coal or oil.
Also mentioned in the article, though not by name, is the Pickens Plan:
Senior Democrats in Congress are getting behind natural gas, portraying it as an alternative fuel for transportation that can serve as a stopgap until renewable sources of energy, like solar and wind power, become economical on a broad scale.
“You can have a transition with natural gas that is cheap, abundant and clean,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC.
She also said that an investment she and her husband had made in a company that produces natural gas for use in automobiles, revealed last week by The Wall Street Journal, was not a conflict of interest because “I’m investing in something I believe in.”
Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the House Democratic caucus, has introduced legislation to offer more tax credits to producers and consumers of natural gas and mandate the installation of natural gas pumps in some service stations.
We repeat it all the time, but the truth is we can’t say it enough: None of this talk about alternative energy, foreign oil, wind power, or natural gas, would be reaching the halls of Washington–or the pages of the New York Times, et al.–if it wasn’t for the efforts of you, the Pickens Plan supporters.
T. Boone’s just the man with the plan; all of you are the ones making it happen.