Wow..T. Boone Pickens sold us all the oil he could in Texas and now that its gone he wants to sell us natural gas and electricity to boot. I think he senses electric vehicles are gonna blow away gasoline, diesel, or hydrogen powered vehicles and he is gonna get "stuck" with all that natural gas, that without demand won't be worth much in the future. Don't think T. Boone Pickens would not raise prices on natural gas just as high as oil if given the chance.

As a Republican I trusted a Texas oil man for the last 8 years in the White House and it has cost me dearly. I am not gonna listen to another now.

I see no downside to building higher wind capacity in the Midwest and using that to displace coal powered electrical generation. Using the resulting freed up natural gas to power transportation is a solid idea because it's kind of a force multiplier for the wind generation. Not only does investment in wind infrastructure reduce coal emissions, but it wipes out a fraction of liquid fossil fuel consumption in exchange for cleaner and domestically produced natural gas. This obviously isn't a panacea, demand will be high, an if we don't burn the liquid fossil fuels someone else will. Critics of his plan would say that we should invest in better public transportation systems instead of more cars. This is a valid complaint, but it's not incompatible with his plan. Recently rising diesel prices have forced a number of transit authorities to raise gate prices which will drive down ridership. This plan could go along with a Bogata style bus rapid transit push to refit old buses for natural gas and expand service. T. Boone Pickens’ plan does not reduce emissions long term but does make market conditions more favorable to doing. It also moves the United States forward in energy sectors that will be most important in the future. We have a choice we can either sell clean tech to the rest of the world or buy it from them. I agree with T. Boone Pickens’, lets be the sellers.

Existing vehicles can be cleaner by converting to burning natural gas. It's not a sustainable end point, but a clever transitional step. Bravo Mr. Pickens.

I don't think this is such a bad idea. The best idea? Probably not, but what is? Wind will be an important part of any near-term future energy mix because at present it is the cheapest of the renewables.

Natural gas is at the very least better for cars than oil, because it is less carbon intensive per unit energy and because we can build cars that crack it for hydrogen, allowing them to gain the efficiency of fuel cell vehicles without needing a massive hydrogen infrastructure right away. Natural gas is already available in many places, though not everywhere. And the supply is much larger, especially if (though I hope this won't come to pass) all though billions of tons of methane locked away in the world's permafrost starts escaping into the atmosphere and we find a way to catch it. It would be much better GHG-wise to have CO2 in the air than methane.

Still, I put my money for transportation (other than public transit and airplanes) on PHEV (for both cars and trucks), and I would venture a guess that the non-electric stage won't stop being oil-based in most parts of the world until we can mass produce good synthetic fuels, from plants, made chemically using clean energy, or otherwise.

Actually, if PHEV do take off as passenger cars, we might expect pressure for other fuel choices to come primarily from anyone with diesel trucks to fuel. The reason is that you can't really change the ratio of diesel and regular gas that you refine from a barrel of crude by much, it is basically fixed. So if demand for gasoline goes down significantly, but we need the same amount of diesel fuel, then we would need to refine just as much oil to get the diesel but not all of the non-diesel portion could get sold. So, the price of diesel would go through the roof. I'm no economist, but this seems like a plausible scenario to me.

This is from the same guy who is buying up water rights from farmers in order to sell it back to big cities by way of long pipelines built on land acquired through regulatory loopholes. This privatization of water will commoditize it and make it unnaffordable to the poor.

If he had an motives beyond greed, he might talk about how ridiculous it is that we get half our electricity from dirty burning coal. That is the major contributor to our GHG emmissions.

I'm not going to say that Pickens is above criticism or that his play on water rights should be overlooked.

But this is a smart 10 year plan that attempts to reinvest in our economy and preserve air quality for generations. Who here has a problem with seeing this country make wind and solar major contributors to our energy portfolio and break out of the fraction of a percantage point status they currently occupy?

As for the Natural Gas strategy, Pickens himself states in the video that it's part of a transition plan for a greener transportation future.

Since Obama has offered little in energy policy answers so far and McCain's answer is to have an underfunded science fair as a means of distracting people from his drill to China approach (part of his 3rd Bush term strategy), who here has a problem with a guy that people who don't live on either coast would be willing to listen to advocating an ambitious solar and wind initiative.

I'm not so sure it's a bad idea either. CNG is pretty cheap right now and it's not a bad tradeoff with wind power in the Great Plains states. Given this however, we would still need to improve fuel efficiency standards to extend the natural gas supplies and it helps not to switch one dependency for another.

T. Boone Pickens is worth billions of dollars and is an 80 year old man. He's clearly..CLEARLY..does not need to be thinking about money here...he wants to help because he has an energy problem.

The only way projects such as this will get off the ground is with private investors because government is too conservative to take the chances.

A private investor in nevada is currently investing millions of dollars to harvest geothermal energy and he will be taking major strain off of the southern californian grid with this expenditure. do you think that the govt would ever take the initiative to involve themselves in something like this? doubtful.

Also, natural gas is still going to be a pretty important asset in the future. Hydrogen/Fuel Cell transportation may lose out versus the possibilities brought about by other technologies currently being developed, but On-Site power sources like stationary fuel cells as back-up systems or even simple power generators (an example of this would be what is currently being implemented in Japan...a 1 to 2 kw fuel cell that can power a single apartment.) What powers fuel cells? natural gas, for the time being...until technologies can develop to allow fuel cells to run off of wind and solar power, natural gas will be an important energy source.

Putting up the wind turbines is a good idea. Swapping off the natural gas to cars may not be so good. Leaving the balance of electricity production as coal would take the USA backwards from China.

A better plan for Pickins ...

Put up the wind turbines.
Go to 100% of electrical needs with wind.
Use the excess nighttime capacity to make hydrogen.
Burn the hydrogen in old natural gas plants during peak power needs.

Invest in Electric cars.

Hey at least he's trying. It would have been a great plan 20 years ago. Several major manufacturers are coming out with electric cars or plugin hybrids in 2010-2011 and I'm guessing more people will buy them than convert their cars to run on natural gas. Electric cars are the future. And given that fact, who's going to pay to install the natural gas refueling infrastructure? The same industry that hasn't invested in a new refinery in, how many years?

I think we should put up as many wind turbines as we can crank out, since of all the renewable energy sources it's the one that's ready now, and is competitive cost-wise and isn't dependent on an expensive element in short supply (silicon). It should be our #1 priority. We should also hammer away at solar cell efficiency, and develop geothermal resources.

well, i think the thing about him being an 80 year old billionare doesn't really hold true. he wouldn't be a billionare if it was about money ... he would've stopped at his first couple hundred million or first billion, you know?

i mean, if I had a boatload of money, I'd probably cash out and be a do-gooder ... anyway, I'm just saying you can't really disregard him having ulterior motives based on his age and money.

Anyone ever hear of the air car? Runs om compressed air and the compresser runs on regular gasoline. It purports to be able to go 800 to 1000 miles on one tank of regular gas. The cost? $17,500. Just a dream? No. They are in use right now in England and India. They are being tested for use in the US by 2009. It will reach a speed of 96 mph and it is a stylish looking 6 passenger car.

The future of american energy is not oil. Any and every new source of energy gets us closer to being off oil. If we drill for oil domestically, it will not effect the price of oil or gas for us as it would just become part of the worlds supply. If we drill our own oil and use it here domestically and charge for it cheaply then we can pursue a policy of no oil use, no oil dependency, no oil blackmail. It won't happen though. It's not human nature. So don't buy into the drilling off shore mantra, do buy into wind power, solar power, and hydrogen power as it will happen. The future looks very bright. We just happen to be the generation where everything started changing.

T. Boone Pickens is just making a sub-par plan that does not really fix anything but it does add some relief to it. He is trying to make sure that cars use natural gas and wind turbines as well. Wind turbines need a source of energy to turn the turbines when the wind dies down and this is usually natural gas which benefitis Boone. So don't be confused by his urge to go clean. Even though he is already super rich, the richer get richer by scheming and making more money.