Face to face with T. Boone Pickens

Pickens: ‘If you don’t think that you’re gonna see a $200 barrel of oil, you’re joking.’

It’s hard not to like T. Boone Pickens. At 80 years, he could have retired many times over from a multi-billion dollar career in the old and gas industry. But this is a man on a mission, and you could see the fire in his eyes when he got up close and personal during a press meeting this morning in Santa Barbara.

Pickens was put on the hot seat earlier this morning at the Wall Street Journal ECO:nomics summit, answering questions and responding to a general sense of skepticism about the Pickens Plan (40% of attendees polled by digital hand-held devices were against the Plan). In case you are not familiar with the now famous Pickens plan it goes like this…


There currently is no comprehensive plan to wean ourselves form foreign oil. This is a very big problem. At any point, OPEC which now controls about 55% of our oil supply could chose to “flip the switch,” forcing the U.S. to pay much higher prices. With rapidly diminishing oil supplies in the U.S. (Pickens endorses Peak Oil theory) our demand for foreign oil will surely rise, resulting in what Boone calls “the fastest transfer of wealth in history,” a transfer from North America to the Middle East.

The transference will be further accelerated when Mexico, our 3rd largest source of oil, runs out (their demand is rising dramatically while their supply has dropped from 2.2 billion barrels per day to 1.4 billion in the last 5 years). And Canada’s infusion of oil might be troubled by the increasingly controversial Alberta Tar Sands. In the background we have the spectre of explosive demand for oil in China, India and South America.

There is a looming inevitability that belies the current $44 per oil barrel. Like the quiet before a storm, it’s only a matter of time before we hit the violent crossroads of demand and supply.

Mother Nature Network