DALLAS--Legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens weighed in on the United States’ energy situation and said using natural gas as a transportation fuel will not only decrease the country’s foreign dependencies, but will also make great strides towards cleaning up the environment.
Speaking during a recent webcast hosted in part by NeoFirma,a provider of information services to natural gas providers Pickens promoted using our own country’s abundance of natural resources – natural gas in particular – to reduce the import of foreign oil by as much as 30 percent.
“Natural gas is a cleaner fuel source and North America has an abundance of supply to tap into,” says Pickens. “Just look at what’s occurring with shale development throughout the country. It’s real and it’s happening everywhere – from Northeast British Columbia to the Barnett Shale in Texas; from the Appalachian Basin to the Fayetteville Shale in Alabama. In today’s business and economic environment, natural gas is much more exciting and promising than oil. It is the premium fossil fuel.”
“The United States’ oil production peaked at 10 million barrels a day during the 1970s,” says Pickens. “Today we’re producing half of that with absolutely no hope of increasing production. Even if we opened up the entire country and looked for it, it’s just not there.”
That statistic, coupled with the nearly six billion dollars being spent each year to import oil, led Mr. Pickens to provide a grim assessment of today’s economic situation. “This is the greatest transfer of wealth from one area to another in the history of mankind, and this country just can’t stand it. But there are ways to make a dent in our dependence on foreign oil.”
Pickens made these comments during his webcast interview with the Southern Gas Association on March 28, 2008. To view the program in its entirety, visit
http://events.variview.net/clients/ctn/20080328
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