News
Beating OPEC Oil
October 21, 2010
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| With the Rangers in the Bronx, our DFW reporter had time to stop by the 2010 Sunbelt Builders Show last week at the Gaylord Texan in Dallas. There, she snapped BP Capital founder T. Boone Pickens, who says he’s close to having the 60 votes he needs in the US Senate to pass his energy plan in a Nov. 17 vote—and he’s spending $82M of his own money on the plan. Boone (or should we call him T. Boone?) says promoting America’s energy independence is his life’s mission; he’s already gotten 20M subscribers on his aptly named Pickens Plan website. His plan? An executive order by the President mandating that all federal vehicles purchased from here on out (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.” |
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| 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 globally) despite the fact that we have only 4% of the world’s population. He also says the US imports two-thirds of 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 4,000 trillion (you read that right) cubic feet of natural gas (the equivalent of three times as many barrels of oil as the Saudis have). |
