T Boone Pickens

Who is this T Boone Pickens fellow, anyway?

Perhaps wind power’s most unlikely champion, T Boone Pickens is an extremely successful oil tycoon out of Texas. Even from before his birth, Pickens has been an oil man. His father was an oil and mineral rights land man and as soon as Pickens left college he went into the oil business himself with the Phillips Petroleum company. When he left them in 1956, he founded his own oil company, later to become known as Mesa. Thanks to a string of successful business moves and acquisitions, by the age of 40 T Boone Pickens was a successful oil executive at one of the most rapidly expanding oil companies in the American south. 

T. Boone Pickens/ credit/source: unknown

All through his career, T Boone Pickens has had an uncanny gift for accuracy when it came to predicting the market and future trends in the direction of his industry. While at Mesa he championed the rights of the shareholder and the free enterprise system, being especially outspoken about it during the 80s and even briefly considering running for the office of president of the United States. When he left Mesa in 1996 many took the opportunity to go over his entire career and perhaps highlight his sometimes highly aggressive corporate ethics, while Fortune Magazine, which did a feature article on his life and his career made the point that most of his at the time somewhat revolutionary ideas about business and corporate culture are now so widely accepted that they are in fact often taken for granted as the obvious and perhaps only valid way of doing business.  

The surprising thing is where T Boone Pickens has turned now that he is getting out of the oil business. An avid environmentalist, Pickens has taken his oil billions and is now using them to support the causes of environmentally friendly research initiatives and corporations around the country if not the world. He is also buying up large tracts of previously overgrazed land left and right in Texas and allowing them to return to their natural state. While the motives behind this may raise some questions, these actions certainly seem good for those particular areas of land. 

Pickens is also investing heavily in water preservation, solar energy, and most primarily, wind energy, and is making an effort to promote the latter on a national level. He has formed the largest wind farm in the country in Texas and is working on several more, in addition to encouraging other business ventures to expand in the direction of wind power as well. He is also the founder of what he calls The Pickens Plan, which he has repeatedly presented to congress in an effort to raise governmental support for a nationalized and organized switch from natural gas to wind power on a large chunk of the nation’s energy grid. This, he says, will leave more natural gas available for transportation across the country, and by promoting natural gas run cars and other automobiles, help to reduce this country’s dependence on foreign oil and petroleum products both in cars and the vehicles and other methods used to transport the fuel to where it is needed.

Wind power is unlimited and free after the initial cost outlay. Given it does not pollute the environment by releasing toxins or carbon into the atmosphere or require the strip mining of the landscape to get at the fuel in the first place, it is a logical next step in our fuel advancement. 

FYI - We are proud supporters of the Pickens Plan !

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