The following op-ed by T. Boone Pickens ran in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on October 31, 2010.
Florida has become a leader in pursuing the use of domestic natural gas.
During the past few decades, the amount of natural gas available for use has grown to estimates averaging more than a 100-year supply. And this is from on-shore deposits. Advances in drilling technology have made available the huge amounts of natural gas contained in the shale deposits under Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Appalachia.
With new supplies of domestic natural gas now available, it has become even more economically and environmentally advantageous to reduce our foreign oil imports and use our vast supply of natural gas.
America continues to import dangerous levels of oil to fuel its national fleets of cars, SUVs, and heavy trucks. In September, we imported 346 million barrels of oil at a cost of $26 billion. That represented about 60 percent of the oil we used in September.
Almost immediately, we can reduce our foreign oil imports by using natural gas as the primary fuel for our national fleet of heavy-duty trucks.
Seventy percent of the oil we import is used as our principal transportation fuel. And nearly half of that is used as diesel to power the 18-wheelers that carry farm products and manufactured goods around the state and across the country.
Congress has legislation it is preparing to move following the mid-term elections. It would jump start a natural gas vehicle industry in America by providing incentives to heavy-truck fleets to begin replacing their trucks that burn dirty, imported diesel, with trucks running on far cleaner, domestic natural gas. This overall policy has overwhelming bipartisan support across the nation because it’s good, smart policy.
There are more than 12 million NGVs on the world’s highways, but only 130,000 of them are in the United States. Over-the-road trucks do not present the infrastructure issues we hear so often when the issue of NGVs is brought up. For most of us, driving our family car is a random pattern of grocery stores and soccer practices. That is not the case for 18-wheelers, which typically run the same routes, on a regular schedule with their drivers tending to stop at the same places for food, fuel, and rest. Putting in natural gas refueling facilities at truck stops along major interstate highways is a relatively simple problem to solve.
We can reduce by half the amount of oil we have to import from the Middle East in just seven years — about the normal working life of an American 18-wheeler — if we begin rotating away from diesel-powered trucks to vehicles running on natural gas.
Many of us are old enough to remember the Arab oil embargo of the 1970’s and the disruption that caused. OPEC nations were trying to influence our foreign policy by starving us of oil. In 1974, we imported less than a quarter of the oil we needed. Imagine the effects of an Arab Oil Embargo in this decade, when we are importing 60 percent of our oil needs, if they, once again, attempt to tell us who our allies should be.
We have not had a national energy policy in more than 40 years and our continued dependence on foreign oil is the result. Congress has a golden opportunity to begin reversing that trend by voting in support of expanded use of natural gas as a vehicle fuel when it comes back to work in November.