T. Boone Pickens took the T. Boone Express to Fayetteville, Arkansas to headline a town hall meeting at the University of Arkansas.

According to reporting in the Northwest Arkansas, Morning News, “About 380 people crowded into a room at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development, perching on stairs and along walls, to hear and see Pickens. Hundreds of others waited in four other rooms to hear and see Pickens through video feeds.”

Boone gave them the Pickens Plan message: We are still importing nearly 70 percent of the oil we use. “The U.S. spends about $450 billion on imported oil, money Pickens said can be redirected within our own borders. “We can create a lot of jobs with $450 billion,” he said.

Reporter Lana Flowers wrote:

“There’s only one resource in America that we have that will reduce foreign oil imports, which is natural gas, when you have a lot of in the Fayetteville Shale play here in Arkansas,” Pickens said.

He proposes uses something like compressed natural gas to power 18-wheel trucks. America also has coal, some oil, geothermal energy, hydroelectric power like is generated at Beaver Lake, and biofuels like the Tyson joint venture to turn animal fat into fuel, Pickens noted.

Take 350,000 18-wheelers powered by natural gas, and it would reduce foreign oil dependence by about 5 percent.

Boone also talked about wind and solar energy, the need for a national Renewable Energy Standard (RES) as well the benefits of building out a new transmission grid.

Denise Bode, of the American Wind Energy Association pointed out the benefits of alternative power sources in addition to reducing our need for foreign oil:

About 8,000 parts go into a wind turbine, potential to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, Bode said.

“It is the manufacturing jobs that are the real opportunity and excitement for this country, and those jobs will be here forever because you are building out new electric generation and it is infinite,” Bode said.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

— The Pickens Team

(Photo credit: J. T. Wampler, the Morning News)