The following Op-Ed by T. Boone Pickens ran in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, February 5, 2012.
If you are going to transform American energy to address the continuing national security and economic risks associated with our OPEC oil dependence, there is only one solution: move America’s expanding natural gas reserves into transportation, with an emphasis on the heavy duty truck and fleet vehicle markets.
Free market advocates argue that’s bad public policy. They fail to understand that OPEC is far from a free market. They’ll tell you we shouldn’t pick “winners and losers” in the transportation fuel segments. I say it’s time to pick America over OPEC. Let’s go with anything American. I’m fine with the battery, but remember, it won’t move an 18-wheeler.
Imagine the impact natural gas could have in solving our energy problem. Targeting heavy duty trucks and fleet vehicles – about 8.5 million in all – could cut our OPEC oil dependence in half in 10 years or less.
Fortunately, while we wait for DC policymakers to lead, the move to replace more expensive, dirtier OPEC oil /diesel/gasoline with cheaper, cleaner domestic natural gas is gaining increasing private-sector support. At an event in Chicago this week, two leaders in the natural gas vehicle industry – Navistar and Clean Energy Fuels – announced a plan to aggressively move to develop a comprehensive system to build natural gas truck engines and provide the infrastructure to fuel them.
Over-the-road trucks tend to run the same routes on the same schedule. Drivers stop in the same places to rest, eat, and refuel. Putting natural gas refueling stations along the major travel routes is a relatively minor logistical issue. Building natural gas engines for those trucks will be a major job creator.
We’re a country awash in natural gas. Since 2008, the biggest shift in energy resources has been the enormous reserves of natural gas contained in the vast shale deposits in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Appalachia. New deposits are being tested in places like Iowa and Ohio but even now, we have a 125-year supply of domestic natural gas literally under our collective feet.
On the world market, natural gas is selling from between $12 per million cubic feet in Europe to $16 in the Middle East. The price in the United States? Less than $3 because of our massive reserves.
Getting that natural gas out of the ground and into our rolling stock is another major job creator. A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that by utilizing America’s shale gas resources “U.S. manufacturers could employ approximately one million more workers by 2025.”
America is sending nearly $1 million a minute out of the country to pay for foreign oil. We’re paying about $100 per barrel for foreign oil and, in the case of OPEC oil, often to nations that are hostile to our best interests.
With gasoline at the pump climbing back toward $4 per gallon we might have thought that energy would have emerged as a top-tier election year issue. In spite of the lingering threat to our economic recovery and our national security, it has not.
For more than four decades, every presidential candidate has said something to the effect of “Elect me, and we’ll be energy independent.” That’s four decades of failed promises.
Once we have serious fuel competition, we can control our energy destiny, have a better grasp on our energy costs, and achieve what we’ve been promised for decades. It all begins with getting on our own resources.
T. Boone Pickens is the architect of The Pickens Plan, a comprehensive energy plan that has been embraced by more than 1.7 million Americans since it was unveiled in 2008. More information is available on his website, pickensplan.com. You can follow him on Twitter @boonepickens.
Read the entire Op-Ed HERE.