Pickens, With $95 Oil Call, Touts Natural Gas Over Foreign Oil (CLNE, WPRT)

T. Boone Pickens has seen his share of ups and downs, and his share of success and failure.  The octogenarian billionaire is testifying in Washington D.C. today to get Americans off foreign oil with the help of natural gas in the U.S.  His stock is Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (NASDAQ: CLNE) that will likely be a huge winner if a nationwide network of compressed natural gas stations gets built to capitalize off this move, although just this weekend in our Unusual Suspects was a very noted valuation pan from Barron’s. Westport Innovations Inc. (NASDAQ: WPRT) may not be the only player in making engines for these trucks using compressed natural gas, but its stock has also been on the move this week.  Pickens gave a $95 oil call today and he is testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee.

Pickens gave a price prediction of $95 oil by the end of 2010 on CNBC this morning and he touted a tax incentive he is proposing to migrate over to compressed natural gas trucks.  “We’ve got to give them $65,000 a new truck… It’s going to take us seven years to do eight million trucks,” he told CNBC today. “If we do that, it’s going to give us $100 billion back into this country that we don’t buy foreign oil with. And every billion that we spend, we create 100,000 jobs…. So on $7 billion, we can create 700,000 jobs.”  As far as his $95 oil target before the end of the year, Pickens cited the global economy improving and demand growing from countries such as China.

Westport is up over 5% at $19.66 today, and it hit a new 52-week high of $19.70 today, on reports that a warrant exercise generated an additional $8.4 million in cash for Westport.  Earlier this week the company announced that it had achieved high volume scale production with Delphi Automotive Systems.  The stock was trading under $18.00 just five trading days ago and the prior 52-week trading before today was $4.18 to $19.42.

Pickens is telling Ways & Means today, “The only way we can solve the OPEC oil threat is by replacing their expensive, dirty fuel with cleaner, cheaper, American natural gas.”   He is urging Congress to pass legislation to dramatically expand the use of domestic natural gas as a heavy duty transportation fuel.  The move today is noted as being buried inside H.R. 1835, or The NAT GAS Act.

Bill 1835  was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 1, 2009 and Pickens said it has 138 bipartisan co-sponsors. The Senate version of this bill, S. 1408, was introduced on July 8, 2009 as a bipartisan bill by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

Pickens again noted that America has not had an energy plan for 40 years and that every single President since Richard Nixon has pledged to reduce American dependence on foreign oil. He also noted that President Obama has pledged to eliminate America’s dependence on OPEC oil in 10 years.

Again, Pickens calls this the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.. WITH A TALLY OF $1 BILLION PER DAY BEING SENT ABROAD FOR FOREIGN OIL…. A billion isn’t what it used to be, but that is an alarming figure.  Pickens noted that the January 2010 trade deficit for the month was $37.3 billion and $27.5 billion of that was money for imported oil, meaning foreign oil is responsible for about 75% of the U.S. trade deficit.

Pickens further noted that some two-thirds of our foreign oil is used as a transportation fuel and that building more nuclear plants or more solar or wind farms will not make a dent in our dependence on foreign oil.

This was interesting… “Let’s dismiss two concerns I hear over and over. First, government doesn’t have a role in this. “Let the free markets work,” they said. If you think OPEC is a free market, you’re nuts. China is using state-owned banks to finance state-owned oil companies to lock up decades of oil production all over the world – including Iraq. Second, the skeptics say there’s no natural gas fueling infrastructure. Forget it. Let’s look to our free enterprise system. If you create the market, the private sector will build it. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had told Henry Ford: ‘Forget about building Model Ts. There’s no place to fuel them.’?”

Pickens is, of course, now trying to use U.S. JOBS as an angle on top of it…. “This is a hearing about jobs. There’s a lot of talk about the Green Economy leading the 21st Century. We estimate the NAT GAS Act will put 236,000 clean natural gas trucks on America’s roads. You will displace 5 percent of foreign diesel demand each year, and create more than 600,000 new, permanent jobs; roughly the same number of temporary jobs created for the 2010 census. Each Class 8 truck — the heaviest of the heavy-duty — converted to natural gas creates 6 jobs.”

Today Pickens also released his monthly update on the level of foreign oil imports in the U.S. showing that EIA data shows about 60% of US oil was imported.  Given the increase in the price of oil in March, Pickens noted that the U.S. will spend $326.4 billion on oil in 2010: nearly 25 percent more than 2009.

JON C. OGG