Since July, 2008 the Pickens Plan has focused on natural gas as a substitute for foreign oil as the primary transportation fuel in the United States.
The Pickens Plan – which has largely concentrated on reducing our reliance on foreign oil – has always promoted utilizing “anything America” to generate electricity, as well as adding insulation, weather stripping and energy efficient machines and appliances in commercial buildings and homes.
In June of 2009, the Potential Gas Committee released its biennial study of the amount of natural gas available for recovery in the United States. Largely due to improvements in drilling technology, the vast shale plays in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Appalachia became candidates for tremendous natural gas recovery.
That means, as T. Boone Pickens said in a town hall meeting at the University of Texas at Dallas recently,
We have the most natural gas in the world, we rank above Russia, Iran and Qatar. We have 2,000 trillion, that’s barrels of oil equivalent, to 350 billion barrels which is about twice what the Saudi’s have in oil.
Natural gas is the only substitute for foreign diesel for moving heavy trucks and it’s great for fleet vehicles, too (just ask AT&T which is putting 8,000 natural gas vans into service in the future). Batteries cannot be used for 18-wheelers, and hydrogen fuel cells may be two or three decades away from full-scale production and distribution. Domestic natural gas is the perfect bridge fuel to technologies of the future.
Natural gas is available as an off-the-shelf technology right now-there are 10 million natural gas vehicles in use around the world today. And with the tremendous natural gas reserves of about 118 years in the continental United States, it is a fuel which we should begin using immediately.
— The Pickens Team