Spehar Column: 'We can't drill our way out of it'

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

— Thomas Edison, 1931 (to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone)

I have no idea about how T. Boone Pickens and Phil Anschutz are registered to vote. But I’d be willing to bet a frosty Fat Tire or a cold Pacifico there isn’t a “D” in the blank reserved for party affiliation on their registration sheets.

I do know they’ve managed to make a buck or two or three (likely with a “B” for billion after the number) in very competitive segments of the business world. My guess is that they were able to do that by managing to look ahead, identify profitable opportunities in changing times, and act on them while staying a move or two up on their competitors.

“I’ve been an oil man all my life,” Pickens says in a TV ad you’ve probably seen. “But this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.” Just like U.S. Senate candidate Mark Udall, Pickens features a wind turbine turning slowly in his television spot.

Colorado-based Anschutz is another gazillionaire whose fortune has been based in large part on gas and oil drilling and production. His Anschutz Corporation announced earlier in the week it had acquired rights to a 3,000-megawatt transmission line to be built at a cost of $3 billion between Wyoming and power-hungry Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

What do these to guys have in common despite their fortunes built largely on conventional energy resources?

They’re betting on making future billions from alternative energy plays while many of their energy industry compatriots are in the “Earth first ... we’ll drill the other planets later” mode.

Pickens, noting we spend four times as much each year on foreign oil as we do on the war in Iraq, is advancing a plan to move the nation toward energy independence with alternative fuels, most prominently natural gas. He wants to generate electricity using wind and solar sources and convert our vehicles to clean burning, domestically produced natural gas.

This would have the added advantage of allowing more local use of western Colorado’s natural gas resources. Right now, according to industry sources, pipelines running to the Midwest export almost as much natural gas every day from the Western Slope as we use on this side of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in a year.

Anschutz, meanwhile, wants to hook the transmission lines he’s buying to a 2,000-megawatt wind farm he’s developing on a ranch he owns just north of the Colorado border in Wyoming.

Permits to run the lines across federal land and several states may take up to three years, and it could take that same amount of time to build the wind farm after necessary permits are obtained for that project. Still, Anschutz’s wind power will likely be on line and in use well before there’s any commercial production of oil shale or a drop of oil reaches refineries from the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge if some politicos are successful in removing restrictions barring drilling there.

To be fair, Anschutz and Pickens aren’t alone. They’re just the latest major players to acknowledge the reality that escapes some of their brethren who still think conventional resources will solve our energy problems.

Major energy companies such as Chevron and BP are also hedging their bets with plays on both alternative sources and energy conservation. Chevron has a unit that helps major users cut energy use through efficiencies. BP wants you to think its initials, at least part of the time, stand for “Beyond Petroleum.”

A now-retired Shell executive who I spent quite a bit of windshield time with once explained to me why his company’s long-term business plan included wind farms and biofuels as well as oil shale and other more conventional petroleum resources.

“We don’t want to be in the buggy whip business,” he’d say, recalling the times when Henry Ford and other entrepreneurs pulled the wheels out from under horse-drawn transportation. I was also admonished to never call Shell an “oil company” but instead an “energy company.” Fair enough, given Shell’s ownership of wind generation in Texas, Colorado and Wyoming.

It’s worth remembering, in the cacophony of complaining we’re hearing from mostly smaller producers and their subcontractors worried about more balanced rules and fairer taxes in Colorado, that the big boys and girls are taking a longer look at our energy future, shifting their gaze from the tips of their boots to the horizon.

More power to T. Boone Pickens and Phil Anschutz. And to us.

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Jim Spehar’s personal energy is sagging a bit in the dog days of summer. You can flip his switch at jimspehar@bresnan.net.