Pickens: Natural gas, Warren Buffett could ease nation’s woes

Roberts: Let me turn to the energy issue. … We’ve talked about your plan to wean America off of foreign oil, use natural gas, you know, get wind power going. You’re also — correct me if I’m wrong — but you’re going to be launching another series of ads here encouraging the presidential candidates to come forward with a plan to wean America off its dependence on foreign energy. Don’t they already have a plan?

Pickens: No. Neither one of them has a plan. The plan I want is to reduce imports of foreign oil. And we can do that one way. Natural gas is a resource we have in America. It is cleaner, it’s cheaper, it’s abundant and it’s ours. So every gallon of natural gas you put in a tank, you will reduce foreign oil by one gallon. So it’s a one-to-one trade-off every time. We could reduce foreign oil by 30 percent. I think we could do it in five to 10 years.


Roberts: So what you’ve heard from them so far doesn’t go far enough down the road?

Pickens: No.

Roberts: But also at the same time, Boone, you are heavily invested in natural gas and there are some people out there who say you’re just promoting your business here.

Pickens: Well, actually, John, I don’t have any natural gas production to speak of. I mean, it’s small. It’s very small. Now, when I was with [Mesa Power LLP], Mesa was a big natural gas producer. But Boone Pickens is not a big natural gas producer. But I am in natural gas fueling on the West Coast. But all of that, every time you use a domestic fuel, you reduce foreign oil. It’s that simple. And we can do it. And this is cheaper. Can you imagine, cheaper, cleaner, abundant and ours? You couldn’t pick a better description of what you want to use.

CNN