Pickens: Middle East Unrest

Pickens Plan - Note to the Army

Army:

T. Boone Pickens' long-standing warnings that our addiction to OPEC oil is a national security issue has attracted new attention as the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt threaten to spread to the oil producing nations of Nigeria, Angola and Algeria.

In the National Journal, reporter Amy Harder quoted Boone as saying:

"Nothing has happened that I've seen that has cut down on the availability of oil," oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told National Journal Daily on Monday. "But the uncertainty has obviously crept into the market."

So, Harder asks, "what's got the oil traders all worked up?"

"They think it could go to the ultimate conclusion and that is that Saudi Arabia could be overthrown," Pickens said. "And that's the largest supply of oil in the world." Saudi Arabia shipped 367 million barrels of oil to the United States in 2009.

Harder points out that to reduce America's exposure to unrest in unstable countries and regions, "the transportation sector needs to be weaned off oil, increasing public transportation, shifting to electric vehicles, and, if Pickens had his way, natural gas engines for large trucks."

Also on Tuesday morning, reporter Darren Goode from the "Morning Energy Report" of Politico.com talked to Boone:

WHAT EGYPT MEANS TO T. BOONE - Pickens thinks the situation in Egypt could get worse - a lot worse - for crude oil and gas prices and that reinforces his message to wean ourselves off of foreign oil imports. "We've already said that something like this was likely to happen and it has," Pickens told POLITICO's Darren Goode yesterday. "If it's not now, that civil unrest will happen again."

He said the problem is not so much what happens in Egypt but whether civil unrest expands to more prominent Middle Eastern oil nations. "You're seeing a dry run of sorts with unrest in countries like Tunisia and Egypt that are not big on the oil market," he said. "And you better watch close because the next one may be Algeria or Libya or, God forbid, Saudi Arabia." "And if that happens," he said, "you're really going to have a mess on your hands."

- Team Pickens