In these morose economic times, one would imagine that holiday party-deprived executives would clamor to attend a business luncheon for the food alone. But at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research's luncheon in New York on Tuesday, the main draw for the 200-plus crowd might actually have been the luncheon speaker himself.
Seats were scarce in the Grand Hyatt Hotel's Manhattan Ballroom as Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens continued his crusade in support of the Pickens Plan, his program to replace foreign-produced crude oil in the US energy portfolio with domestically produced natural gas and wind power. And though Pickens has had an almost inescapable media presence since announcing his plan earlier this year, his enthusiastic audience showed no signs of growing weary of his message.
"All of us are to blame for where we are today" in terms of depending on foreign sources of energy, Pickens said. "We operate like we have oil," rather than holding a mere 3% of the world's crude reserves. And that dependence will prove dangerous, both in terms of soaring crude oil prices and national security, he said.
Pickens took particular aim at the Washington political establishment, arguing a lack of realistic steps toward an energy plan over the last 40 years. "We've passed some energy legislation. Was it a plan? No," he maintained. "The people in Washington have no idea of the magnitude of the problem we face . . . Washington doesn't understand energy."
Pickens met with both presidential nominees, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Barack Obama, earlier this year to discuss his plan. "They wanted to learn in one hour what I knew about the oil industry," he remarked.
Though Pickens came away from those meetings somewhat underwhelmed by the candidates' knowledge about energy issues, he is more enthusiastic about the team that now-President-elect Obama is assembling for his administration. In particular, incoming Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta, one of the co-chairs of Obama's presidential transition team, "understand [energy] very well," Pickens said.
In any event, Pickens is not likely to vanish from the public radar anytime soon. "I'm building an army to get this accomplished," he said. "I'm going to get it done."
Given the current down turn in the economy any new project (wind, coal upgrades, etc.) may be seen as a gamble and or struggle to get financing. Yet on the opposite side of the coin with energy demand going down (how much and how long is hard to predict) could this provide a good time to perform longer outages or outages during the summer which is not typical either? Should the industry be looking at this time as an opportunity?