Fueling our clean energy future

T. Boone Pickens

Sunday, May 9, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Not many states have the capacity to enjoy the benefits of alternative energy like Nevada. The sun shines. The wind blows. Major natural gas lines run right through Las Vegas, Carson City and Reno to supply the major population centers. And, as the Las Vegas Sun reported a year ago, “Nevada is poised to overtake California as the American geothermal energy leader.”

This self-sufficiency is becoming more and more important as the world begins to stir out of the global recession and the industrialized nations need oil to fuel their factories and run their cars and trucks.

The United States is far, far from Nevada’s self-sufficiency when it comes to oil. Month after month we import about two-thirds of the oil we use and 70 percent of that is used as transportation fuel.

Once again, in 2010, we are likely to spend close to $400 billion on imported oil. That will not produce one single job in Nevada or anywhere else in the United States, but it will produce plenty of jobs in places like Iran and Nigeria.

We have more than 250 million light trucks, SUVs and cars. We have about 8 million heavy trucks — from refuse and recycling trucks to 18-wheelers. The day may come when light trucks and cars run on battery power. When that happens, the electricity which is produced by that wind, solar and geothermal energy will recharge your battery and let you drive from home to work and back again.

But that day isn’t today and, in any event a heavy truck won’t run on battery power. The only two fuels available today — or in the foreseeable future — are imported diesel and domestic natural gas. Heavy-duty trucks use approximately one-third of the oil we import as a transportation fuel.

Oil is selling on the world market for more than $75 per barrel. The spill in the Gulf of Mexico will not have a long-term effect on prices but competition with other countries, especially China, will.

China’s economy is growing at double-digit rates and the Chinese know they are going to need growing supplies of oil to fuel that growth. Over the past two years China has spent approximately $175 billion on oil purchases and “loans for energy” deals to secure future oil production from countries like Iraq and Venezuela. Over the next decade the amount of oil available in the world for daily production will stabilize, then begin to decline. China has locked in its supplies. We will be at China’s mercy.

Natural gas is cleaner than either gasoline or diesel. In fact, it is the cleanest of the hydrocarbon fuels, producing half of the greenhouse gases of gasoline and none of the particulate emissions common to diesel.

We have enough natural gas to last 200 years. Perhaps more. Recently developed drilling techniques have allowed us to safely recover the natural gas contained in the enormous shale deposits under Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Appalachia. Similar deposits are available for natural gas recovery in Canada. We have more than twice the amount of energy available in our natural gas reserves as Saudi Arabia claims to have in its oil reserves.

Because of the vast amount of natural gas available for recovery, the price has dropped to the point where it is about a third less than the cost of diesel on a gallon-equivalent basis. The argument that the refueling stations don’t exist for a large number of natural gas vehicles (NGVs) doesn’t apply to heavy trucks, school and municipal buses, express delivery trucks or any fleet which either goes home to the barn every night or, in the case of over-the-road trucks, tend to run the same routes on a regular basis. Private industry will handle that; no taxpayer money will be needed.

It is fitting that Las Vegas will host the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles Conference this week. It is a conference dedicated to moving our national fleets off dirty, imported foreign oil, and onto alternative sources, including clean, domestic natural gas.

Sen. Harry Reid, an original co-sponsor of the NAT GAS Act (S.1408 and H.R.1835), has been instrumental in assembling bipartisan legislation to help jump-start the NGV heavy-truck industry in the U.S. The NAT GAS Act provides the incentives for fleet owners to buy vehicles running on clean, domestic natural gas instead of vehicles running on imported gasoline or diesel.

We estimate that over the next five years the NAT GAS Act can help get approximately 236,000 clean natural gas trucks (heavy, medium and light-duty) on America’s roads and augment the existing natural gas fueling infrastructure. This alone would help displace approximately 5 percent, or nearly 2 billion gallons, of diesel every year. Equally important, this program can create more than 600,000 direct and indirect jobs.

There are more than 11 million NGVs on the world’s highways, but only 130,000 in the U.S. Reid is in a unique position to help get this important legislation passed in Congress and help begin to reverse our ever-growing dependence on foreign oil.

Nevada is doing its part to make the best use of alternative fuels. It is time that the rest of the nation catches up.

T. Boone Pickens is creator of the Pickens Plan and the founder and chairman of BP Capital, which has investments in natural gas and Clean Energy Fuels Corp., one of the largest providers of natural gas for transportation in North America.