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Last week, Pickens stopped by The Times to discuss his push to wean the U.S. off foreign oil by dramatically ramping up development of its infrastructure for wind and natural gas. Below is a partial transcript. T. Boone Pickens: We are now importing oil that costs us $700 billion a year. That's four and a half times what the Iraq war costs. Nobody running for president even speaks about this. Yet they talk a lot about the Iraq war. When you look at it, the world oil supply is about 85 million barrels of oil a day. And demand is about 86-plus million barrels a day.

In an attempt to close off a leak, BP blew of the cap that collects the oil on the riser pipe, belching 66,000 barrels yesterday, and no capture of oil was done

The cost of oil peaked above $140 a barrel this summer, nearly double the price a year earlier and 40% higher than worst-case scenarios discussed just months earlier. Gas prices followed suit, peaking well above $4 a gallon during peak driving season and sending drivers, carmakers and politicians all into fits. Heating oil prices started climbing to record levels months before heating season.

News flash: Terrorists sink an oil tanker, blocking the vital Bosporus Strait. Oil rockets to $160 a barrel and gasoline to $5 a gallon in the United States. What can keep the globe's biggest oil-guzzling economy from running dry?

In four years, U.S. gas prices have doubled to more than $3.70 a gallon, and crude oil has tripled to around $125 a barrel. Allowing for inflation, that's higher than prices were during the 1978-83 oil shock that triggered a recession and sky-high interest rates. But . . .

June 5, 2008 -- Solar power from Africa's deserts could supply all 600 million citizens currently without electricity and even export power to Europe, a green energy conference in Nairobi heard Thursday. The ferocious desert sun could provide the energy equivalent of 1.5 barrels of oil per square kilometer, said Gerhard Knies, project manager for Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), at a meeting of nine African states.

The UK government's renewables consultation called for a green revolution in energy. In doing so, it created a perfect tabloid rod for its own back. The proposed cost-to-consumer calculated by the Department of Business were based on the vanishingly unlikely prospect of an oil price as low as $70 a barrel in 2020. Expected additions to UK energy bills, at that oil price, would be 10-13% for electricity and 18-37% for gas, the government said.

JUST three years ago, with oil trading at a seemingly frothy $66 a barrel, David J. O'Reilly made what many experts considered a risky bet. Outmaneuvering Chinese bidders and ignoring critics who said he overpaid, Mr. O'Reilly, the chief executive of Chevron, forked over $18 billion to buy Unocal, a giant whose riches date back to oil fields made famous in the film "There Will Be Blood."

With fuel prices rising and supplies dwindling, more and more inventors are turning their creativity towards cars that work without the need for barrels of gasoline. True, there have been a number of vehicles released that run on electricity but now designers are turning to another precious resource - air. It's not a new concept, as early as the 1920s, car designers were dabbling with the idea of cars that could run off air alone - one involved cycling air through a propeller at the front of the car - but few came to fruition. Now, designers are again looking at how air can be used to power a car.

Surmont Phase 2 Oil Sands project involves the expansion of the Surmont steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) plant to increase its production capacity from the existing 27,000 barrels of bitumen a day to 136,000 barrels of bitumen a day. The Surmont site is located approximately 60km south-east of Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the Athabasca oil sands region.

Kuwait National Petroleum Company's (KNPC) Clean Fuels Project (CFP) involves the upgrade and integration of the Mina Abdulla (MAB) and Mina Al Ahmadi (MAA) refineries. The project will increase the combined capacity of the refineries from the existing 736,000 barrels per day to 800,000 barrels per day, and will lower the sulphur content of petroleum products to 5%.

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