Who is T Boone Pickens? Simple Guide to Pickens Plan

By Nick July 12, 2008

T Boone Pickens has been dominating th headlines as of late because of his outspoken ideas and peculiar background. This 80 year old Texan is a billionaire oil tycoon making noise for his rightful criticism of the US’s addiction to oil and his very specific energy plan for the nation. Claiming the nation will be as interested in him as they are in Obama or McCain is quite the claim made by Pickens, but i can’t say that he’s all wrong. So what is the Pickens plan?

T Boone Pickens oil man clean energy

The Pickens Plan has a few different parts to it but it’s simply based on making US energy independent. Since our imported energy has grown to like 70% for oil, he sees this as unsustainable, so name of the game is become independent from foreign oil. The main points of the Pickens Plan, simply, are:

Become the Saudi Arabia of Wind in the US - The US has some of the highest wind speeds in the world and more utilization is necessary.

He is backing this idea with a $12 billion wind farm of his own in Texas.
Pickens believes this change could change oil imports from $700 billion to $400 billion in 10 years.

Natural Gas replaces a third of transportation fuel - With wind powering a lot more of the electric grid, domestically produced natural gas would then be able to be utilized as a transportation fuel.

While not a perfect plan in my mind, I have to hand it to the guy for not sitting back on his black gold billions, but instead making some waves in the energy world. So please, T Boone Pickens, continue your media blitz* and get us to keep talking about you.

*media blitz = Pickens Plan Twitter, Business Pundit, BoonePickens.com, Clean Technica, Earth 2 Tech, Forbes, Facebook Pickens Plan, ABC News, Matter Network,…… and surely 100s more stories and coverage..

Topics: Energy |