Anyone who has watched TV in the past couple months has seen them: commercials starring an elderly gentleman with a Texas accent deploring our nation’s dependency on foreign oil. He claims we must look forward, throw off the yoke of oil and turn to wind and natural gas.

He may seem to be stating the obvious, but T. Boone Pickens’ self-named Pickens Plan carefully delineates the path toward alternative energy. No one of influence has purposed something more viable to wean America off our dependence on foreign oil.

Boone believes that “the United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind power.”

We must harness that power. Boone’s Pickens Plan begins with mass installations of “wind generation facilities” along the Great Plains. The energy generated would account for 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, leaving 20 percent of our natural gas unused.

Most of America’s electricity comes from natural gas. Through the Pickens Plan, natural gas would be used as our primary source of transportation fuel.

The Pickens Plan calls for the conversion of 2 million heavy trucks: almost all the big rigs in the country: to become natural gas effective. This would cut down on 1/4 of the nation’s oil.
Boone expects the effects of this energy transfer to immediately overwhelm the nation’s economy. He expects to decrease the dependence on foreign oil by 1/3 in 10 years, bringing our $700 billion per year addiction down to a more manageable figure.

Tenacious, crusading and ambitious, T. Boone Pickens: the 11th-hour angel of alternative energy: is an oil man. An entrepreneur and once owner of the largest independent oil company in America, Boone currently stands as the founder and chairman of BP Capital Management, “one of the nation’s most successful energy-oriented investment funds.”

Boone amassed staggering wealth and experience through the oil business, but lately he has invested in more reformist interests. The most notable pursuit is Clean Energy, a group that promotes the use of natural gas as a cleaner alternative to oil and diesel in transportation.

Clean Energy would play a dominant role in the nation’s conversion to natural gas for transportation, clearly profiting Boone. Boone admits that the plan would benefit his interests, but he swears that he’s “rich enough” and his “standard of living is about as good as it can get.”

It’s true. Worth roughly $4 billion, Boone is one of the richest men in America, but he puts his money where his mouth is. Boone has spent $2 billion dollars: soon to be $10 billion: building a wind farm on his mammoth 68,000 acre ranch in Texas. He spent $58 million on commercials, interviews and internet advertisements to publicize the plan.

Likewise, Boone is realistic about the enormous costs of the Pickens Plan. In just the wind turbines alone, Boone estimates it would cost $1 trillion to harness the wind power, and $200 billion to distribute it to towns and cities.

The cost of converting 2 million big-rigs to natural gas is astounding. Service stations must re-vamp and install new pumps; cars would have to be converted or scrapped. However, Boone claims this is a “one-time cost,” and spending $700 billion a year overseas for oil is clearly an economic drain.

Weaning off foreign oil would serve as an economic boon for the United States. Money spent overseas would be re-circulated into the American economy. Jobs on wind farms and power plants would be a blessing in rural America, and at $1 per gallon for natural gas, driving would be cheap and the air would be clean.

“We can do so much at home with the money here, instead of letting it go out of the country,” Boone explained in a “60 Minutes” interview.

Boone urges the American consumer to support the Pickens Plan. He claims that without his plan, the country has only one option for energy: oil.

“There’s no option one, two, three.”

Boone is also open to alternative plans of action to move our country out of our oil addiction.

“If there’s a better one, get it out there and let’s talk about it.”