Rick Raw: Pickens Plan Evangelist–Pledging My Time to Save Us from Foreign Oil

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

We’ve all seen the ads on TV– billionaire oil man, T. Boone Pickens hawking his new plan to wean us off foreign oil. Intrigued, I investigated PickensPlan.com and I was impressed by Pickens grass roots initiative to install more windmill fields and bring Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) to the market to replace gasoline as a bridge to hydrogen powered vehicles. Of course, I’ve touted hydrogen/fuel cell vehicles in past and future Rick Raws as being the ideal goal. I know about fuel cells because I helped develop them for Project Apollo–the moon landing initiative.

Normally, I’m not a joiner. Groups bore me. They sit around talking and doing nothing. Ah but, Pickens seems to want action. So I joined the Pickens Plan supporters pledging some of my time to help make Pickens’Plan happen. What can I do? Well, I can raise holy hell with my lame brain representatives in Florida and Washington. Frankly, I’m sick of high gas prices and these politicians need to make this plan happen or be voted out of office. Yeah, I’m just one voice, but with the other committed Pickens Plan activists, we can make a difference. After all, it’s our government. We can make it work for us if we get off our apathetic asses and do something productive.

When I joined the Pickens Plan army, I was inundated with E-mails from other supporters to join the discussion groups. But I wrote back that we should stop talking and act. First get CNG pumps to gas stations across the country ASAP. Second, make conversion kits available to anyone that wants to have their car converted to running on CNG, which is a simple and cheap hardware changeover. Man, I’m ready to do it now. Hell, I’d connect a tube to my ass and run my car on my own natural gas if I could.

CNG makes sense because it burns much cleaner and costs 40% less than gasoline. We have pipeline access to vast CNG supplies. Moreover, critical greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas are 23% lower than diesel and 30% lower that gasoline.. Today, many city bus fleets are powered by CNG and many more truck fleets are making the conversion. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach recently announced that 16, 800 old diesel trucks will be replaced by CNG powered trucks. It’s a radical move to green the busiest ports in America.

The best part of using CNG is, almost 100% used in the United States comes from North America as opposed to 70% of oil coming from foreign nations. We could tell those OPEC towel heads to go pound sand.

So what is the time frame for Pickens Plan to be implemented? Building new wind generation facilities and a natural gas infrastructure can replace one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years. Pickens admits it’s contingent on our next President’s commitment to this initiative.

Imagine if we can phase out the war in Iraq and the billions of dollars that we have been spending on that misadventure could be spent on making Pickens Plan a reality. Hell, we could be driving CNG powered cars in five years. But like all of our worthwhile domestic plans, the Pickens Plan could get bogged down in partisan politics. Let’s hope that new ways of doing things will be inspired by a new forward thinking administration.