ENERGETIC SPEAKER

Bisnow Dallas reporter Tonie Auer sent us a word from T. Boone Pickens at the 2010 Sunbelt Builders Show last week at the Gaylord Texan. The BP Capital founder says he's close to having the 60 backers he needs in the US Senate to pass his energy plan, scheduled for a vote on Nov. 17. Tonie snapped him discussing the $82M of his own money that he's spending on the bill. It's a bargain, he says, since promoting America?s energy independence is his life?s mission; he's already gotten 20M subscribers on his aptly named Pickens Plan website. What is the plan? An executive order by the Prez mandating that all federal vehicles purchased (about 200k annually) operate solely on domestic fuel. He didn't even specify what kind: battery, ethanol, natural gas. It doesn?t matter, T. Boone says, ?I would take anything to beat OPEC oil.?
We snapped this of the Gaylord Texan, which was getting decorated for Christmas (seriously, before Halloween) while we were there. Boone says the US consumes about 21M barrels of oil daily (out of 85M barrels produced each day) despite the fact that we have only 4% of the world?s population. Additionally, he says, the US imports 2/3 o f that oil daily. His criticism isn't our usage, but the fact that the US is so heavily dependent on oil from Middle Eastern countries that hate us and that the government has no energy plan and hasn?t for 40 years. He says the US has the largest natural gas reserves in the world with 4k trillion (you read that right) cubic feet of natural gas (the equivalent of three times as many barrels of oil as the Saudis have).

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