Information About Using Gas Instead of Oil

While Boone Pickens is hardly a neutral observer, I found this information from Forbes to be very interesting, so I'm bringing it to you:

– Global demand for oil is 86-88 million barrels per day. It will be 90 million by the end of the year, due to global growth.

– Global production is 84 million barrels per day. Since production falls short of demand, prices have risen.

– America consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day. We produce 7 million barrels domestically and import the other 13 million barrels. Of the 13 million barrels of imported oil, 5 million come from OPEC – “nations that hate us,” says Pickens.

– The true cost of Middle Eastern oil is over $300 a barrel if you account for U.S. military presence in the Middle East, according to Pickens.

– “Drill baby, drill” – the conservative mantra to drill more oil from the Gulf of Mexico, off the East and West Coast shelves, and the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would produce an extra 2 million barrels a day at best, says Pickens. The would raise America’s domestic production from 7 million to 9 million barrels but still leave America 11 million barrels short each day.

– In ANWR, the bottleneck is the pipeline from Alaska’s north shore. “It would take 30 years to build another pipeline,” says Pickens.

Keeping in mind that Pickens is in the natural gas business, he makes these points when he contends that America's commercial trucks should be converted to natural gas rather than diesel fuel:


Pickens claims the U.S. has natural gas reserves equivalent to three times that of Saudi Arabia’s known 260 billion-barrel oil reserve when you use a Barrel of Oil Equivalent (BOE) comparison.

– Using BOE, natural gas, at its current price, would be about $1.50 per gallon cheaper than diesel fuel.

– Using BOE, natural gas emits 30% less carbon