T. Boone Pickens Responds to Al Gore's Climate Speech: In a "My plan is better than your plan" kind of statement T. Boone Pickins announced: "Today, former Vice President Al Gore put forward a framework of a plan that is focused on global warming and climate issues. My plan is aimed squarely at breaking the stranglehold that foreign oil has on our country and the $700 billion annual impact it has on our economy. We import 70% of our oil and that number is growing larger every year. Vice President Gore's plan does not address this enormous problem, it is clear that he and I have two different objectives and our plans should be viewed with that in mind." Hmm...
Why is T. Boone Pickins important? He's a rich, very rich, richer than god, Texas Oil Man. And if nothing else recent history has shown that Texas Oil Men have an inordinate ability to make this country do things differently before.
The Pickins Plan (linked below) is to install a massive wind farm system in the Midwest. Conveniently it would begin in the Texas Panhandle area. His plan points to there being massive amounts of wind there. The other half of the plan is to use the electricity to liquify natural gas. The LNG would be used to drive cars and perhaps LNG can be burned directly in existing cars or with small modifications?
His plan has some good points. For example wind power only is delivered when the wind blows and the wind doesn't always blow when you need it most. The question is how to store wind power for use later. Doing something like liquifying natural gas is one way to store electricity, but there are other ways. For example air could be compressed and then later released through an air turbine.
A big flaw in his plan is that while Oil has a looming peak oil situation there is also a natural gas peak. While natural gas is more widely available today than is oil, it will eventually also come into short supply. By moving to natural gas based "energy" we'd still be dependent on fossil fuel, and we'd only be delaying the real problem.
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