Politico is a website and newspaper which has become the "go to" source for up-to-date political info in Washington. In this morning's editions, Politico has a guest editorial by T. Boone Pickens titled "One Year Later, We Still Import Too Much Oil."
Boone points out that even though oil is about half the price it was one year ago today - July 8 - when the Pickens Plan was rolled out,
We are still importing nearly 70 percent of the oil we use. Much of it comes from countries that are in unstable regions or that are unfriendly to the United States - or both.
On the day when Senators Harry Reid (NV), Orrin Hatch (UT) and Robert Menendez (NJ) are to introduce the Senate version of the NAT GAS Act, the op-ed points out
By providing incentives to change 350,000 heavy trucks from diesel to natural gas, we can cut our oil imports by about 4 percent. That's just the beginning. Once we build momentum, manufacturing costs will drop and replacement rates will rise.
We're not about to run out of natural gas any time soon. Boone writes:
We have plenty of natural gas. The huge amounts of natural gas contained in the shale deposits under Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Appalachia have helped drive America's natural gas reserves to more than a century's worth.
A recent study by the Potential Gas Committee found that there are 2,074 trillion cubic feet of domestic natural gas reserves - the equivalent of nearly 350 billion barrels of oil, about the same as Saudi Arabia's oil reserves.
The article concludes with the same point Boone has been making for the past year:
The Pickens plan is the only plan on the national agenda to meet that goal, immediately reduce our dependence on foreign oil and buy ourselves the time to develop more advanced renewable fuels.
To read the entire article by Boone click HERE.
-- The Pickens Team