Billionaire Texas oilman spends $58m on alternative energy campaign

The billionaire Texas oilman T Boone Pickens today unveiled a $58m PR campaign aimed at convincing Americans to replace petrol with natural gas and wind.The Pickens Plan, as the 80-year old has dubbed his effort, would involve an estimated $1tn government investment to substitute wind for the 22% of US electricity now derived from natural gas. The next step would be using the excess natural gas to power vehicles, a capacity already available to automakers but rarely used. Pickens claims the plan would reduce oil imports by hundreds of billions of dollars while creating thousands of new jobs in the US."I've drilled more dry holes and also found more oil than just about anyone in the industry," Pickens wrote in a Wall Street Journal column today announcing his plan. "With all my experience, I've never been as worried about our energy security as I am now."One undeniable beneficiary of the Pickens Plan would be Pickens himself. He has bet $12bn on a massive new wind farm in rural Texas and his BP Capital hedge fund is heavily invested in the natural gas industry.Pickens told reporters this week that his new push is not motivated by profit, but he acknowledged to the Guardian in April that his new wind farm is a business move: "Don't get the idea that I've turned green," Pickens said then. "My business is making money, and I think this is going to make a lot of money."But Pickens has found unlikely encouragement from environmental groups, with Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope proclaiming that he "is out to save America".His new PR campaign, which taps Facebook and YouTube to build support for the Pickens Plan, aims to prod the presidential candidates into an in-depth discussion of the global energy crisis. Commercials featuring Pickens are blanketing the US airwaves.Pickens is an avowed Republican, bankrolling the "Swift Boat" adverts that helped George Bush defeat John Kerry in 2004, but he has kept the new alternative-energy effort free of politics."We have a golden opportunity in this election year to form bipartisan support for this plan," Pickens wrote in his Journal column.Consistently ranked among the world's richest people, Pickens has also dabbled in corporate gamesmanship. He grabbed 10m shares of Yahoo in May and supported raider Carl Icahn's effort to persuade the company to merge with Microsoft.He earned the nickname "oracle of oil" for correctly predicting that prices would rise to $100 per barrel when such high prices seemed unthinkable for most. Pickens has warned investors to prepare for $150 oil in the near future.