Oil mogul: Change is in the wind

WASHINGTON — Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, echoing his message from a weeks-long advertising blitz, urged Congress on Tuesday to embrace a largely untapped potential of wind power to help free the United States from its dependence on foreign oil.

"Our country is in a deep hole, and it's time to stop digging," Pickens told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in a series of Capitol Hill appearances.

Pickens, 80, ranked by Forbes as the 117th-richest man in the United States, has amassed a $3 billion fortune as one of the nation's most successful oilmen. But the entrepreneur is urging Americans to quickly shift to other forms of energy to escape what he called a national-security crisis over the nation's "addiction" to foreign oil.

The United States spends $700 billion a year — four times the cost of the Iraq war — to buy oil from foreign countries, some of whom are hostile to the United States, Pickens said. In the next 10 years, $10 trillion will leave the country to buy foreign oil.

"It will be the greatest transfer of wealth from one country to other parts of the world in the history of mankind," he said.

Pickens said he has committed $58 million "to tell this story," including a series of television ads and Internet presentations. He has also bought a natural gas-powered Honda Civic GX.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, committee chairman, called Pickens' ideas "visionary" and "practical."

"I hope you stick with it," said Lieberman, I-Conn.

Pickens doesn't oppose offshore drilling, a chief Bush administration proposal, he said Tuesday. However, he said, there aren't enough U.S. reserves to make a substantive difference.

Pickens said the United States could generate at least 20 percent of its electricity by tapping power from the nation's "wind corridor," a vast stretch of territory from West Texas to the Canadian border.

That would enable the nation's abundant natural-gas resources, now widely used to generate electricity, to be used for powering transportation, he said. U.S. automobile manufacturers should ramp up natural-gas-powered vehicles, he said, and government vehicle fleets should be powered exclusively by natural gas.

If implemented, he said, the "Pickens Plan" could reduce dependency on foreign oil by more than a third, saving at least $230 billion a year.

Pickens' company, Mesa Power, is building the world's biggest wind farm near Pampa in the Texas Panhandle. When completed, the $10 billion complex will double the nation's wind-energy output.

Another major complex is in Sweetwater in West Texas. Flat, open areas throughout the nation's midsection also hold the potential for hosting thousands of wind turbines, but Pickens said government action may be required to acquire land for transmission lines to move wind-generated electricity to urban markets hundreds of miles away.

Critics have questioned some aspects of the plan.

For example, the 20 percent goal for wind-generated power may be a tall order, considering that about 1.5 percent of U.S. electricity is produced by wind now.

Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association, said achieving Pickens' goal would require constructing 150,000 to 200,000 turbines. But he didn't rule it out, noting the wind industry grew by 45 percent last year.

The biggest roadblock could be updating the overstressed national power grid. Under Pickens' plan, electricity from the new wind turbines would be carried from them through privately financed power lines and flow through the national grid to population centers in the South, Midwest and West.

But already, "our grid is carrying more energy than it was built for," Swisher said. "We desperately need more transmission simply to serve the needs of the electric industry."

Pickens said Congress should start funding improvements to the grid.

Eric Wachsman, director of the Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy at the University of Florida, said Pickens' plan also could boost the already-rising cost of natural gas.

According to the Department of Energy, the price of natural gas nearly doubled from 2002 to 2007 and is rising.

EPA delays action

on ethanol waiver

LUBBOCK, Texas — The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday put off a decision on Texas' request to temporarily lower ethanol requirements for gasoline, a change Gov. Rick Perry said is needed to rein in corn prices.

EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said the agency needs more time to review more than 15,000 public comments and consult with other departments. A decision had been due Thursday; the agency said it hopes to have a decision in early August.

An energy bill passed in December required 9 billion gallons of ethanol to be blended into gasoline from Sept. 1 to Aug. 31 of next year. Perry, a Republican, asked the EPA in April to drop the Renewable Fuels Standard requirement to 4.5 billion gallons because the demand for ethanol is raising corn prices for livestock producers.

More than four dozen House Republicans and two dozen GOP senators, including presidential candidate John McCain, have written to the EPA in support of the waiver.

— The Associated Press