Tilting We Will Go?

T. BOONE PICKENS wants to solve the energy crisis by building windmill farms. With characteristic reticence, he is announcing his intentions with a series of slick, glossy TV and newspaper ads, a website (PickensPlan.org), and a forthcoming book. As often happens with autodidacts proclaiming a world vision, Pickens is about half right and half wrong.

As one of the most experienced and successful oilmen in the world, he is certainly on target about the threat diminishing oil supplies present to America: “We now import almost 70 percent of our oil. . . . Importing that oil is costing us $700 billion a year, $7 trillion over the next ten years. . . . World oil production has peaked at 85 million barrels a day while demand is still growing. Output may never go up again.” This is an important point, but Pickens’s solution is dangerously simplistic and naïve: “We now produce 22 percent of our electricity with natural gas. [Actually, it’s 20 percent.] I want to replace that 22 percent with wind energy and move the natural gas over to the transport sector, where compressed natural gas can replace oil. That will lower our oil imports by 38 percent. The federal government says it’s possible. It’s right here in this study, ‘20% Wind Energy by 2030,’ put out by the Department of Energy.”

About the Author

William Tucker

Mr. Tucker is author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey.

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T. BOONE PICKENS wants to solve the energy crisis by building windmill farms. With characteristic reticence, he is announcing his intentions with a series of slick, glossy TV and newspaper ads, a website (PickensPlan.org), and a forthcoming book. As often happens with autodidacts proclaiming a world vision, Pickens is about half right and half wrong.

As one of the most experienced and successful oilmen in the world, he is certainly on target about the threat diminishing oil supplies present to America: “We now import almost 70 percent of our oil. . . . Importing that oil is costing us $700 billion a year, $7 trillion over the next ten years. . . . World oil production has peaked at 85 million barrels a day while demand is still growing. Output may never go up again.” This is an important point, but Pickens’s solution is dangerously simplistic and naïve: “We now produce 22 percent of our electricity with natural gas. [Actually, it’s 20 percent.] I want to replace that 22 percent with wind energy and move the natural gas over to the transport sector, where compressed natural gas can replace oil. That will lower our oil imports by 38 percent. The federal government says it’s possible. It’s right here in this study, ‘20% Wind Energy by 2030,’ put out by the Department of Energy.”