T. Boone Pickens had an essay published in Politico, the highly regarded inside-the-beltway news organization, in which he says there is no free market in energy and the U.S. has got to have a plan to operate in a manipulated market.
“OPEC is a cartel,” Pickens wrote. “It controls prices with production. Since October, the Saudis have sharply curbed production, and consumers are seeing the impact at the pumps today.”
He also reminds readers that “70 percent of the world’s oil is controlled by state-owned oil companies. Or that the federal and state governments are constantly changing tax and regulatory policies – CAFE standards are a good example – to appease one interest group or another for whom the oil industry is an easy target.”
The way to drag the world – or at least the United States – back into a free market energy system is to “inject serious fuel competition into America’s transportation market.”
Seventy percent of the oil we consume is in the form of transportation fuels – gasoline for cars and light trucks and diesel for heavy-duty vehicles. Batteries are a difficult substitute for gasoline in passenger cars, but will not move an 18-wheeler.
The only substitute for imported diesel is natural gas for heavy-duty trucks.
“We now have enough recoverable natural gas to last about 100 years. By that time, I believe we’ll be far beyond today’s internal combustion engines,” Pickens says.
To read the entire essay in Politico, click HERE.
— The Pickens Team