Slim Pickins From T. Boone Pickens

Slim Pickins From T. Boone Pickens

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, July 14, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Energy Policy: A world-famous Texas oilman says our energy answer lies in alternative energy. While tilting at windmills, he says that we can't drill our way to energy bliss. So why do the Russians keep drilling?

Writing last week in the Wall Street Journal, T. Boone Pickens modestly says he has found more oil and drilled more dry holes than just about anyone. He says America's energy dilemma can't be solved by drilling alone, but by alternative energy such as solar and wind. He has launched a TV ad blitz in which wind farms are prominently featured.

America's energy future, says a longtime oilman, is written on the wind.
Pickens cites an Energy Department study that claims the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity from wind by 2030. Yet the fact is that if we tripled our current output from wind, solar and geothermal, they would produce just 2.2% of our current energy needs after decades of subsidies amounting to billions of dollars.

Pickens says the "stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada is called the 'Saudi Arabia of the Wind' . . . we have the greatest wind reserves in the world." Perhaps we do, at least in the halls of the drill-nothing Congress.

Well, we're also the Saudi Arabia of coal, but Pickens mentions coal not at all. The U.S. has 27% of the world's recoverable coal. A ton of coal can generate two barrels of synthetic oil.

On that basis, as the New York Times pointed out a few years ago, "the coal in the ground in Illinois alone has more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia."

This technology is in use today in South Africa, where three coal-liquefying plants produce about 150,000 barrels of oil a day. At the above conversion rate, America's coal reserves are equivalent to 20 times our proven crude oil reserves. Liquefied coal could solve our liquid energy needs for the next two centuries.

Another massive domestic energy reserve Pickens does not mention is shale oil. Another Energy Department report says the Green River formation underlying parts of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, deep inside Pickens' wind tunnel, contains as many as 2 trillion barrels of oil trapped in porous rock close to the surface. Two trillion barrels is seven times the Saudi reserves.

The problem with wind and solar — other than getting the power from where it is generated to where it is needed, which requires transmission lines the environmentalists won't accept, even if they and the wind farms could be built in time — are their intermittence.

A Reuters story on Feb. 27 reported, "Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency."

The operator of a grid generating 1,100 megawatts of electricity had to shut down when that part of the Saudi Arabia of the Wind died and forced consumers to pound sand.

A lot of wind blows across Siberia, too, but Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday chose not to cut the ribbon on a wind farm, but rather toured a new Arctic oil rig designed to boost Russia's declining domestic production.

This is something Republican presidential candidate John McCain should do — visit our successful and environmentally friendly oil production facilities at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska and ask Democrats why we aren't drilling in nearby ANWR as we approach economy-wrecking $5-a-gallon gas.

Putin told assembled ministers and Gazprom executives that "the rate of growth of production has gone down . . . . In the first quarter of this year, production even declined 0.3%."

He said the new Prirazlomnaya rig, to be completed in 2010 and able to operate offshore at 58 degrees below zero, will help address Russia's energy needs.

The Russians know that the energy answers will not be found blowin' in the wind, even if Pickens and the Democrats do not.