In his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama said that “no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy.” I couldn’t agree more.
One of my secrets over my 81 years has been to look ahead and not just plan for the best, but work hard to make “the best” the only possible outcome. Sometimes “the best” has been harder and taken longer than I originally thought it should, but I get there with determination.
When I began the Pickens Plan about 18 months ago, oil was just about at its peak of $147 per barrel. I went on the air talking about sending $700 billion a year overseas to pay for our imported oil and just about every candidate for president – including the winner – picked up the chant: Reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Then came the financial crisis, the recession deepened, and oil prices collapsed to about $32 a barrel. With so much else to think about, and to deal with, foreign oil fell off the front pages and out of political speeches.
I haven’t stopped working, and neither have the 1.6 million members of the Pickens Plan Army. I have continued to tour the country making speeches, appearing on news and business TV shows, doing radio interviews and visiting members of the House and Senate. Oil has now rebounded to more than $80 per barrel, and the numbers just released by the U.S. government show we imported more than 4 billion barrels last year at a cost of about a third of a trillion dollars. That works out to approximately $1 billion every workday of the year.
Our latest ad begins with the words, “Go back to sleep America, the oil crisis is over,” written in Arabic script. The oil crisis is not over. We continue to import nearly 70 percent of the oil we use, and two thirds of that is used as a transportation fuel: gasoline for our 230 million cars, SUVs and pickups; and diesel for our more than 8.5 million trucks and bus fleets.
Every mile we drive takes money out of our economy and puts much of it into the economies of countries that don’t like us. And the people who hate us – those terrorists with whom, President Obama has proclaimed, we are at war – know that our addiction to foreign oil is America’s strategic Achilles’ heel.
The fact is: We can reduce our need for foreign oil virtually immediately by beginning to fuel heavy-duty fleets with the enormous reserves of natural gas that have been identified in the continental United States. Largely due to advances in drilling technology, the vast amounts of natural gas – over 100 years’ supply – that is contained in the shale deposits in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Appalachia can be safely and commercially recovered.
There are 10 million natural gas powered vehicles (NGVs) on the world’s roads, a tiny percentage of which are in use in the U.S. Why? Cheap gas. Every time we get a head of steam up for replacing our traditional internal combustion engines with a safer, cleaner fuel, the price of oil drops, we forget the pain, and we go right back to our oil-burning ways.
By transitioning even a small percentage of America’s heavy-duty vehicles from burning foreign diesel to American natural gas, we can in short order strengthen U.S. national security, enhance our economic security, and create and save American jobs.
The House and Senate have legislation in committee and ready for action: the Nat Gas Act. In the House, it is H.R. 1835. In the Senate, it is S. 1408. The bills provide tax breaks for the purchase of vehicles that will run on natural gas. These companion bills have bipartisan support in both chambers. That alone makes the Nat Gas Act unique.
Every president since Richard Nixon has promised to address the national security crisis associated with our ever-escalating dependence on foreign oil, but none has.
President Obama has a unique opportunity in history to change that.
This opinion originally ran at AOL News.