Bill Maher Interviews T. Boone Pickens on Energy

It's a fascinating conversation, check it out. By the way, I love the fact that T. Boone Pickens - a lifelong Republican and oil man - is spending millions of his own dollars promoting wind and solar power, as well as a transmission grid to get that power from where it's produced to where it's needed. That's all excellent.

What I don't like about the Pickens Plan, however, is the concept that we should replace oil used in transportation (e.g, gasoline and diesel) with natural gas. True, natural gas is cleaner than oil and has a lower carbon content. That's great. But here's the problem: according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the United States contains just THREE PERCENT of proven world natural gas reserves (211 Tcf out of 6,257.8 Tcf), yet consumes TWENTY ONE PERCENT (23 Tcf out of about 105 Tcf). Even if you add in Canadian and Mexican gas, we're still only up to 4.5 percent of world natural gas reserves. Yet T. Boone Pickens is talking about significantly increasing U.S. natural gas consumption in years to come, specifically to fuel our automobile fleet.

So, if there's not enough natural gas in North America (and there definitely isn't, at least not PROVEN reserves, which is really what matters), where would we get all this natural gas? I asked Pickens about this on a blogger conference call back in October 2008, and first off he sounded shocked at the numbers, despite the fact that I was reading them right off the EIA website. He started rambling about potential natural gas fields that might be explored and exploited. The problem is, those are not PROVEN natural gas reserves, they're just hypothetical, and certainly nothing to base a major energy plan on. That's a huge problem, pretty much a complete non-starter to the natural gas portion of the Pickens Plan.

Another problem is that the largest proven natural gas reserves in the world (all from the respected Oil and Gas Journal) are located in countries that aren't necessarily our friends.

1. Russia: 1,680 Tcf
2. Iran: 948 Tcf
3. Qatar: 905 Tcf
4. Saudi Arabia: 253 Tcf
5. UAE: 214 Tcf
6. United States: 211 Tcf
7. Nigeria: 184 Tcf
8. Venezuela: 166 Tcf

That's right, world natural gas reserves are located in pretty much the same exact countries as the ones that currently have us over the barrel for oil: Putin's increasingly autocratic Russia, Ahmedinejad's Iran, our Wahhabi buddies in Saudi Arabia, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, etc. Unfortunately, if T. Boone Pickens gets his way on the natural gas portion of his plan, we will not only be addicted to OIL from these countries, but to NATURAL GAS as well. Just imagine, oil tankers AND liquefied natural gas tankers making their way down the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz on their way (hopefully) to market. Does that thought, the idea of adding even MORE reliance on the same "countries that hate us," give you a warm and fuzzy feeling? No, I didn't think so.

But wait, there's more! Once that LNG gets to the United States, it has to be re-gasified at receiving terminals which nobody wants built in their backyards, or anywhere near their backyards. That is, even if the economics of LNG made sense, which they most likely don't. So much for that idea.

In sum, there are excellent aspects to T. Boone Pickens' plan (wind, solar, transmission grid), but the natural gas piece just doesn't cut it. The problem is, since most Americans - voters and politicians alike - aren't energy experts (as T. Boone Pickens says in the Bill Maher interview), this is not widely known. So, sure, let's praise Pickens for the good parts of his plan, but let's not buy the entire thing before we've read the fine print.