Interview With T. Boone Pickens

From August 2012 at DC Velocity.

People think it's a free market for oil. It's not a free market for oil. OPEC sets the prices. Twenty million barrels come through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Only 7 percent of that goes to the United States. But we have our military over there to protect that. According to a study by the Milken Institute, we spent $7 trillion from 1978 to 2010 on Mideast oil. A great part of that was military spending, but it's still connected to the price of oil.

In the last 10 years, we have transferred $1 trillion of wealth to OPEC oil producers. That's the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. If this continues for the next 10 years, assuming a price of $100 a barrel, it will cost $2.5 trillion. This is not sustainable.