The Oil Man Cometh

[Dover]

"Go on, pull my finger"(my caption)

The Oil Man Cometh

New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: July 24, 2008

There he is, the sound of money in a wizened Texas drawl, the tired realist looking a bit like the John Huston character from “Chinatown” as he warns in national television ads that we should just listen here and do as he says.

And what the 80-year-old T. Boone Pickens says, in a $58 million campaign, is that we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices. By implication, anybody who tells you otherwise — including the fellow Texan he helped put in the White House — is a fraud.

This is a political parable for the ages: the guy who was behind one of the knockout punches to John Kerry four years ago is now doing Democrats the biggest favor of the election by calling Republicans on their phony energy campaign.

“Totally misleading” is the way Pickens describes Republican attempts to convince the public that if we just opened up all these forbidden areas to oil drilling then gas prices would fall. He’s not against new drilling, but he is honest enough to say it wouldn’t do anything.

Republicans are furious at their longtime benefactor. Senator John McCain is currently running an ad in which he directly blames Barack Obama for $4-a-gallon gas at the pump — as bogus a claim as anything yet made in 2008.

Then along comes Pickens, Texas oilman and billionaire corporate raider, overwhelming the McCain attack with a saturation message that has the added value of being true, as Henry Kissinger once said about another matter...cont'd

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/opinion/24egan.html?em&ex=1217044800&en=1e478b4347228419&ei=5087%0A

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Worlds Largest Wind Farm Proposed by Pickens

By Chris Olsen
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 6:51 p.m.


PAMPA -- T. Boone Pickens and his Mesa Group are working on a wind energy project that would tower above any other in the world.

The multi-billion dollar wind energy project, they are working on cover's a four county region.

Mostly of the development will be seen in Gray and Roberts counties, with a little Hemphill and Wheeler counties.

Pickens invited only a select group of people to a private meeting on Tuesday where he outlined his plan to start the largest wind energy production the world has ever seen.

“We looked at an area where we had water rights, with real good wind and it's just that simple,” said Mike Boswell with the Mesa Group

The early plans call for a two-to-four thousand-megawatt project, doubling maybe quadrupling the current largest wind farm residing in Abilene Texas...cont'd

http://www.kvii.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=38035

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Blue Gold - T. Boone Pickens Hoarding Water Rights
Huffington Post link to Business Week article:

Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite, and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He's now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it's all a matter of supply and demand. "There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That's the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing," he says. ..cont'd

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/18/blue-gold-t-boone-pickens_n_107884.html


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[niyad]

1. thanks, I have been wondering what the real reason is behind his apparent change of heart.

[Dover]

3. The game of politics is for 'the little people', like sports teams.

The very wealthy own the teams.
They aren't political...just self-interested.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. Yup.

The old pirate wants to commoditize everything. Even air, given half a chance.

[Dover]

4. It's upsetting to me that Carl Pope of the Sierra Club is supporting this.

...Because so much is at stake in the energy debate, some are quick to embrace Pickens. An endorsement from Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, is prominently displayed on the Pickens Web site.

“To put it plainly,” Pope says, “T. Boone Pickens is out to save America.” I asked Pope why he lent his words to someone who had so much to do with giving us another four years of the oil intransigence of the Bush administration.

“Ten billion dollars gets my attention,” he said.

[Dover]

5. The big money for Pickens is in the water. The wind is meant to sweeten the deal.

Excerpt from HuggingtonPost/Business Week link:

2002, Pickens began approaching several of Texas' sprawling cities, all of which share one defining feature: Their populations are growing so quickly that they are constantly in need of new supplies of water. But with water, as with so much else, location is critical. And Pickens' water is far, far away from anyplace that might buy it. Pickens knew he'd have to build a pipeline, and to do so at anything resembling a reasonable cost, he'd need the power of eminent domain—the right of a government entity to force the sale of private property for the public good. Water utilities have that right. If Dallas agreed to buy Pickens' water, it could extend such authority to him. But Dallas deemed Pickens' price too high and declined to do a deal. So Pickens and his executives tried to create a Fresh Water Supply District—a government entity that would have that power. But they couldn't get it through.

Over the next several years, Pickens continued accumulating water rights and began to lease other land, this time with the idea of creating the world's biggest wind farm. "One of the great wind areas is right up where we are," says Robert L. Stillwell, Pickens' general counsel. "You can set it right on top of where the water is." And since, one day anyway, Dallas may well buy both, Mesa could use a single right-of-way for the water pipeline and the electric lines.

In Roberts County there would be real economic benefits from the wind farm. "The wind is meant to sweeten the deal," says Representative Chisum. "The big money for Pickens is in the water."


POWERFUL LOBBYING
In January, 2007, the Texas Legislature convened in the grand statehouse in Austin. The 80th session turned out to be very productive, and one person who kept busy during that time was J.E. Buster Brown, a former state senator and one of the most powerful lobbyists in town. Among Brown's clients is Mesa Water. "My job is primarily defensive," Brown says of his work for Pickens. "I'm watching to make sure there is no legislation passed that creates obstacles to Pickens doing what he wants to do. I'm supposed to make sure nothing bad happens."

Brown did more than that: He helped win Pickens a key new legal right. It was contained in an amendment to a major piece of water legislation. The amendment, one of more than 100 added after the bill had been reviewed in the House, allowed a water-supply district to transmit alternative energy and transport water in a single corridor, or right-of-way. "We helped move that along," says Stillwell. "We thought it would be handy and helpful to everyone."

After the bill passed, Tom "Smitty" Smith, Texas director of Public Citizens, an advocacy group, says several legislators were drinking coffee and reading through it. "Uh-oh," one said. They'd just realized the amendment would help Pickens build his pipeline. "Many legislators were watching for this play," Smith says, "and it still snuck by." State Senator Robert Duncan, a Republican who represents Lubbock, says: "It probably should have raised our suspicions, but we were moving a lot of bills. And it would have been hard to hold up this one even if we'd discovered the amendment."

cont'd


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b4089040017753_page_4.htm

[DCKit]

6. Pop goes the weasel!!!

One billion in personal investment, government contracts, tax breaks and subsidies to the tune of Brazillions, then tens of millions per month for water, NG and electricity for all eternity.

That's one smart motherfucker.

[Dover]

7. don't forget getting the laws changed just for him and his project....

nothing changes.

[Finishline42]

8. Not sure I understand???

A billionaire oil man is spending over $50 million of his own money to push Alternative Energy (mainly wind and solar) to provide 20% of our electricity - and somebody still wants to complain? When has anybody else from that side of business come up with a workable plan that did not push AE to the kids table?