Pickens II - Natural Gas for Heavy Equipment Vehicles

DOBBS: Now, your plan is to have natural gas move into transportation, correct?

PICKENS: That's correct. It already is. There are 8 million vehicles around the world on natural gas and only 142,000 of them are in the United States. Can you believe, I mean, with our leadership, did not take us in the right direction. But not trying to place blame, it's really our problem. Yours, mine, and the rest of the people in America.

DOBBS: You're exactly right. And the cost of conversion to natural gas for large vehicles, those dinosaurs or the gas guzzlers are the ones in many cases that are most readily convertible to natural gas, are they not?

PICKENS: I'm not interested in passenger car near as much as I am in heavy duty equipment. The government should move quickly to mandating that all new vehicles that be purchased by the government would be natural gas vehicles. General Motors has 19 different vehicles they make but none in the United States. All of them out of the country. South America and Europe.

DOBBS: Right.

PICKENS: But here's what is interesting. Gazprom last week, the biggest company in the world, Russia, they announced that they were going to put natural gas fueling stations all over Europe. Now, that's interesting because it tells you that we're behind again. We're behind again. Here we are. We have natural gas, which is cleaner, cheaper, abundant and domestic. Video Watch Pickens discuss plan for wind power »

DOBBS: And let's be clear about this, too, Gazprom, the Russian oil and energy company, is not doing it out of the goodness of its heart, it's driving profits but at the same time creating greater dependency in Europe, Western and Eastern Europe on Russian energy because of the pipelines that move from Russia into Europe. So there's a strategic plan behind what they are doing as well. There is no strategy in this country whatsoever, even as a consumption economy we don't have a plan.

PICKENS: We have not had a plan in 40 years, Lou. What I want to do is to fold in the great resource we have in the central part of this country, which is wind. And then you have resource from Texas west to California. You've got solar. Those two resources have to be developed. So when you develop the wind, you can then remove natural gas from power generation and put it into a transportation fuel market. We can do that; and is it easy? Almost easy. There have to be some things, some hurdles to clear. But when you take that natural gas out of power generation and put it into transportation fuel, that's 22 percent of that 23 trillion. That amount, you put into transportation would reduce our imports by 38 percent. See where states stand on renewable resources »

DOBBS: I'm going to round it off to 40 percent. That's an immense impact immediately. It's about $300 billion that you would save a year.

PICKENS: That's right.

DOBBS: More on the out years as we move into the next decade. Where you estimate, we could be transferring as much as $10 trillion in wealth from this country to primarily to the Middle East and to other oil-producing nations unless we change directions and do so quickly.
PICKENS: ... of the oil we import comes from the Mideast and Africa. The two most unstable areas. And if we did this, we can do it in five to 10 years, and we could get away from that dependency of 38 percent.

DOBBS: Now, I want to point out, Boone Pickens is not only offering a plan and solution and strategy, he's also investing his money in wind power while others are talking about it. And posturing and playing some ideological and partisan games. Boone Pickens, as always, it's a great pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for looking out for the country.