The Pickens Plan??

The Pickens plan seems to be anything that involves the government spending billions on infrastructure, or giving away billions in tax credits, so that Pickens can personally benefit financially from the extraction of natural gas owned by his companies, or the placement of wind farms on lands that are currently too far away from usable distribution facilities (even though there are plenty of other places more conveniently located). Someone can try to present facts I don't know about, but I don't think incentives for greater use of natural gas are useful or necessary.

 

Not useful or necessary unless you want to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. No one solution will get us out of that hole.

That said, we must allocate incentives among the alternatives taking into account all of our objectives (energy security, pollution, climate change, etc). And do so without unduly enriching Boone or anyone else.

Wind, wave, solar, nukes, whatever. If it contributes toward solutions to these tough problems, bring it on. If Boone makes or buck or two, well good on him for moving us forward.

 

We need to start using our natural resources more wisely.

Natural gas is not unlimited and it's should be used where it makes the most sense:

Electrical generation: because it can ramp production up or down quickly, it makes a great peak load fuel. It also works very well to buffer the extremes of wind and solar.

Co-generation: Flexible enough for co-generation plants.

Heating buildings: The infrastructure already exists to heat existing buildings and water. If our heating needs start competing with our transportation needs we will see huge heating bills. I realize this is already the case on the East Coast where oil is used for heating.

Our personal transportation needs to move from fossil fuels to renewables and the best way to do that is EV!

 

I keep mine here on the Earth, where it is much less likely to catch fire.

Seriously, though, natural gas is still a hydrocarbon, and as such, burning it releases carbon into the atmosphere. It's a great source of energy if you don't give a flying you-know-what about what happens to the climate in 20 or 30 years.

But then, I think the human race is screwed because nobody is willing to stop having babies hand over fist, and the people who make energy policy are the fossil-fuel companies, run by rich old men with an extremely short time horizon and an insatiable greed.

To be fair to Pickens, however, it looks like the proposal is an 80% tax credit on only the difference between a gasoline car and a natural gas car, and that difference is not great. Batteries, OTOH, can cost as much as the entire rest of the car, for a range in the vicinity of 100 miles.

 

Bingo.

-Brad