Oilman sees shift to wind Posted on July 11th
T. Boone Pickens made his name tilting at windmills—trying in the 1980s to buy oil companies that didn’t want to be bought—and now he has turned to building windmills on a parched patch of Texas scrubland instead.
True to form, though, former corporate raider Pickens cannot resist taking on a daunting crusade worthy of Don Quixote: Trying to convince the country that the government and private investors should spend $1 trillion over 20 years to erect thousands more windmills in hopes of cutting U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Billions more, he knows, would be needed to build transmission lines to carry the wind power across the country.
The bullwhip in Pickens’ hand is the $58 million he has budgeted to promote his ideas and make energy security a top issue in the presidential campaign. With oil selling around $140 a barrel, he said, the U.S. sends $700 billion a year to other countries.
“You’ve got the largest shift of money in the history of mankind,” Pickens said in his languid Texas drawl. “I don’t know whether it’s either naive, weak, stupid or whatever, but we have drifted, drifted, drifted, where we’re now importing almost 70 percent of our oil.”
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