T. Boone Pickens and former Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Woolsey, have published an essay in the National Review Online on the need to use domestic natural gas as a major transportation fuel.

In their op-ed Pickens and Woolsey point out that

Oil monopolizes about 95 percent of the world’s transportation, and OPEC – eight nations in the Middle East and four others – controls nearly 80 percent of the world’s conventional oil reserves.

OPEC uses that leverage to decide how much oil to pump and at what price to sell it. Saudi Arabia, they write, has decided it needs $90 per price for its oil to meet its domestic needs – essentially buying off its citizens.

No amount of increasing mileage for America’s car and light truck fleet can solve the “central” problem of OPEC simply cutting output to keep supplies tight and prices high.

Increasing domestic oil production will not solve the problem because domestic prices would simply follow global prices up and down.

The only solution is to move from dirty, imported, expense diesel – largely refined from OPEC oil – to clean, domestic, cheap natural gas; especially for heavy duty trucks.

Neither biofuels nor batteries will move an 18-wheeler. And even if we were selling and producing millions of electric/hybrid cars per year (which we are not) “less than 1 percent of electricity is produced” by using oil as a fuel so “using electric cars to reduce oil consumption is 99 percent off-base.”

Domestic natural gas, at current prices, would cost a trucker about $2.00 less per gallon equivalent than diesel.

We need to move expeditiously to convert a large share of our buses, delivery vans, and other fleet vehicles to run on compressed natural gas (CNG); and trucks, to run on liqueified natural gas (LNG). The conversions will pay for themselves within a year or two because of the now-huge price advantage that natural gas has over oil.

They call for an “open-fuel standard” which would allow the market to produce vehicles that can run on a variety of fuels.

One of us (Pickens) emphasizes transitioning the nation’s heavy-duty and fleet-vehicle market to compressed and liquefied natural gas, a move that could create more than 400,000 new jobs and cut OPEC dependence by 70 percent. The other (Woolsey) stresses the low, one-time cost (under $100 per car), according to recent studies by MIT and General Motors, of making it possible to use methanol and gasoline in the same vehicle.

They call for an end to our OPEC oil addiction by writing:

Let’s make a national commitment to this and bring forward the day when we can all cheerfully tell OPEC that if they don’t like it they can go play in their oil ponds.

You can read the entire essay in the National Review Online by clicking HERE

— The Pickens Team