Lawmakers Hear Ideas For Energy Independence, T. Boone Pickens Pushes Wind Power

(RTTNews) - A Senate panel heard ideas on Tuesday geared towards reducing the country's dependence on foreign oil. The experts included legendary oil man T. Boone Pickens, who discussed his plan for using wind-based power to improve the country's energy self-reliance. Other programs focused on biofuels and conservation.

Likening the energy situation to the crises faced by the country in World War II and the Cold War, Pickens urged a massive expansion of wind energy production, accompanied by an expansion of the electric transmission grid. He also argued for a shift to natural gas for transportation, which he said could cut U.S. oil imports by 38 percent.

Pickens said the main role for the government should be to extend production tax credits for 10 years to provide stability for those seeking to invest in new energy and to set up rights of way for electric transmission wires - either for government to build the grid or to give to private companies to do so.

"I imagine this could be like the Eisenhower Administration," Pickens said, referring to the massive investment in the U.S. Interstate Highway infrastructure. "I also feel that this is an emergency too. It has to be done quickly."

Another panelist before the committee was Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, who laid much of the blame for American energy woes squarely at the feet of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

OPEC, Luft said, produces only slightly more oil today than they did in 1973 in spite of rapidly increasing demand.

"The source of our predicament is that we have a cartel married to a monopoly," he said. "If we want to solve our energy security problem, we must break both the cartel and oil's monopoly in the transportation sector."

Merely increasing domestic production and increasing efficiency will not be enough to solve the problem, Luft said.

"Such non-transformational policies at best buy us a few more years of complacency, while ensuring much worse dependence down the road," he said.

The true solution lies in requiring auto manufacturers to build cars and engines that can function using a variety of fuels, Luft said "to ensure that cars rolling onto America's roads are platforms on which fuels can compete."

But manufacturers need to go beyond ethanol, a biofuel made from corn or sugar which is already being used in some domestic flex-fuel vehicles. Luft said the vehicles also need to be able to run on methanol, which is less efficient than ethanol and more corrosive, but cheaper and can be produced from a much wider variety of sources.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey Anderson, president and CEO of Smart Growth America, urged more conservation and smarter development planning to create communities that encourage residents to drive less.

"I think we need to think about this charge in a broader sense," he said. "We also need to think about the demand side and some of the conservation things T. Boone Pickens began to talk about … to allow people to drive less and do more."

Habib Dagher, a professor at the University of Maine, added that Picken's plan to dramatically expand wind energy potentially did not go far enough.

Pickens' plan focuses on tapping the wind energy of the Great Plains, but didn't address building wind farms offshore, which Dagher said could potentially double the amount of domestic wind energy without requiring as much in transmission infrastructure as many large population centers are close to the coasts.

"The offshore wind is about equal to the U.S. electric production today," he said. "There's over 100 gigawatz of wind power in the Gulf of Maine. That's about 10 percent of the total U.S. electric production."

He added that wind patterns also increase production during the winter, when additional power is needed to heat homes, Dagher said, likening it to a seasonal crop.

But there are some technological barriers, Dagher said.

"It's going to require developing floating platforms, because the continental shelf off the United States drops off very quickly," he said. "We need your support to create a national offshore wind energy initiative, a 'Manhattan plan' for offshore wind energy that can double Pickens' plan."

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