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Boones Energy Solution

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Q&A with T. Boone Pickens
By Jim Snyder
Posted: 07/21/08 06:29 PM [ET]
T. Boone Pickens made a name for himself, and a few billion dollars, as an oilman and corporate raider. These days he has a new mission: promoting the “Pickens Plan .”


By improving the nation’s electric transmission system, vast wind resources from the Dakotas to Texas could be tapped to power population centers hundreds of miles away, according to Pickens. The natural gas that once went to electric utilities could instead be used as a transportation fuel.


Because natural gas is cleaner than gasoline and wind doesn’t pollute at all, the Pickens Plan has attracted advocates like Sierra Club President Carl Pope and former Vice President Al Gore.

Pickens, a Republican fundraiser, welcomes the support, but his main motivation is keeping $700 billion that would otherwise go to purchasing foreign oil in the United States: “I’ve got one enemy. I’ve got one rifle. I’ve got one crosshairs. And it’s focused on one spot.”


An interview with Business & Lobbying Editor Jim Snyder begins with Pickens explaining when he started thinking about his plan.

I actually believed you could do this in 1988. Twenty years ago. That’s when I was CEO of the company Mesa Petroleum. One [million cubic feet] of natural gas equals eight gallons of gasoline. I thought that if I can get to $5 or $6 for natural gas, I could save my a--. Because at that point we had distributed a lot of money to our shareholders believing the price of natural gas was going to go up. And I borrowed money to do that, and my back was against the wall. And I thought that if I could get this over to a transportation fuel, where it should be, because its 80 percent cleaner than gas and diesel, and was cheaper, and it was domestic … I’d get up in front of a crowd and say, “This fuel is cheaper, it’s cleaner, it’s domestic.” You know what the first question I’d get? “How much cheaper?” They didn’t give a damn whether it was cleaner or domestic 20 years ago. It didn’t have anything to do with it. … It was really hard for me to sell. …


And Gazprom [Russia’s state-controlled gas company] last week announced that they are going to put natural gas fueling stations all over Europe. What does that tell you? Yeah, it’s a good idea, I think. Not that the Russians need to show me a good idea, but it does confirm what you knew.


Natural gas is being used as a transportation fuel now. Eight million vehicles in the world today are on natural gas. Only 142,000 of those are in the United States. What’s that tell you? It will all happen if you promote the use of the fuel. If President Bush had promoted natural gas like he did ethanol, a lot of things would have happened by now.

Full article:
http://thehill.com/business--lobby/qa-with-t.-boone-pickens-2008-07-21.html

Boone will be testifying in front of Congress live on C-SPAN 3 tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM eastern.....
 

TexasBred

Well-known member
BUSH BUSH BUSH....It's always BUSH.

Ethanol: Congress, Mandates and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Posted by: McQ on Saturday, February 23, 2008


Congress has recently mandated the use of alternative fuels, specifically ethanol, in the latest energy bill to become law. In fact, it has specifically outlined both the amount and type of ethanol which must be produced. But as we will see below, that has and will continue to have some unintended consequences that will be difficult to argue are positive.

The Mandate

It essentially breaks down like this:

2008: 9 billion gal/year renewable fuel vs. prior rate of 5.4 bgy

2012: 15.2 bgy in 2012 vs. prior rate of 7.5 billion

2022: 36 bgy in 2022

So the mandate increases the amount of ethanol in the system by 4.6 billion gallons this year and to 15.2 billion gallons a year by 2012. By 2022, the mandate requires 36 billion gallons of ethanol production be on line and producing.

Corn-only ethanol is supposed to top out at 15 bgy in 2015 and remain at that level of production for the foreseeable future.

Advanced bio-fuels, bio-diesel and cellulosic ethanol, are supposed to make up the difference between the 15 bgy of corn-based ethanol and the final total of 36 bgy by 2022.

That all sounds perfectly wonderful; however, there are some real problems which will most likely cause this plan and its mandates never to come to fruition.

Technical Problems

As it stands at this very moment, the only ethanol product in production is corn based ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol, the great hope of the future, has many technical problems. As the American Petroleum Institute noted in a recent conference, “Significant technology breakthroughs are needed for economic production of ethanol from cellulosic biomass”.

In fact not a single cellulosic ethanol production site exists at this time and only now are there plans for a demonstration site. The “solution” for renewable fuel doesn’t even exist at this time, but is mandated, 8 years hence, to be in full production and pumping out 4.25 bgy of ethanol. At the moment a viable process to fulfill the mandate doesn’t exist. What does exist is a process which is price prohibitive on any scale.

Price problems

One of the promises of ethanol is to reduce Green House Gases (GHG). But the question becomes, at what cost? The technical problems with cellulosic ethanol have been touched upon. But that’s only part of the problem. Bio-diesel is primarily, at least at this stage, a soybean product. And obviously, the only ethanol we have available at the moment, other than that which we might import, is corn based. What has happened to both corn and soybean pricing recently? This chart from US News and World Report, based on Chicago Board of trade numbers, gives you an idea. The rise in prices you see have happened within less than 2 years.

Bush is all for increased natural gas use. Texas is the largest producer of natural gas in the country.
 
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