T Boone Pickens: corporate raider who saw the renewable light

published 29 August 2008

As Damascene conversions go, it rates among the most dramatic. Three years ago, T Boone Pickens was the ultimate Texan oil wild-catter, a billionaire Good Ole' Boy who dismissed renewable energy as a fad. Then, says The Independent, "he saw the light". It was green. So the flamboyant Pickens, 80, once one of America's most feared corporate raiders, has now emerged as the country's "most unlikely champion" of renewable energy, spending millions on a wall-to-wall media campaign to put the issue at centre-stage during this year's presidential race.

But don't "mistake Pickens for a tree-hugger", says Newsweek. His chief concern is energy security. "Forget about saving polar bears and compact fluorescent light bulbs; Pickens is peddling pure old star-spangled US self-interest." His ads, complete with a doom-laden soundtrack, feature burning oilfields and US soldiers standing watch in the desert. "We're paying $700bn a year for foreign oil," says Pickens. "It's breaking us as a nation. Where do you think we're going to be in 10 years when our economy is busted and we're importing 80% of our oil?" Some are calling him the green heir to Al Gore. But there's every sign that "the irreverent capitalist" has captured public attention "with an ease and flair that eluded the earnest, Nobel Prize-winning Democrat". "I'm the only one with a plan," he told the New York Times.

So, what's in it for Pickens? Quite a lot. He is investing $10bn to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas panhandle (see below) and is already the country's largest private owner of natural-gas fuelling stations. "If demand for these sources soars, as his plan envisions, he is positioned to win big." With a personal fortune put at $3bn by Forbes (he says it's more like $4bn), he's supposedly not in the game for the money, but it's a claim at odds with the habits of a lifetime. This, after all, is the man who was one of the inspirations for the rapacious Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street and was once dubbed "the most hated man in corporate America" by Fortune.

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Pickens grew up in the prairie town of Holdenville, Oklahoma where his father, a disgruntled lawyer who "loved cigars, cards, a hearty drink and a night out with the boys", made a killing gambling on oil leases, says The Chicago Tribune. After a degree in geology, young Boone (The 'T' is for Thomas) followed his father into oil and set up his own company, Mesa Petroleum in 1956 with an initial $2,500. But Pickens didn't make his big money directly from oil, he made it "by trying and often failing to take over big oil companies". Claiming to be a shareholder activist, he became a past-master at "green-mailing" (buying shares in targets and then assuming such a threatening stance that they were glad to buy them back at an inflated price).

Pickens has also endured many setbacks. In the 1990s his "dark decade" he lost his business (thanks to a bad call on the gas price) and succumbed to depression. But he bounced back in 1998 to form an energy hedge fund, BP Capital Management. Now he claims that rebuilding the American energy system is his "most important work". If he pulls it off, concludes Newsweek, "Pickens' legacy plan will be the biggest deal in his career."

Former 'oil prophet' cuts an eccentric figure and has a sentimental streak

The tough man of Texas now on his fourth marriage may be mellowing with age. Beneath his grizzled, hang-dog exterior he has an undeniably sentimental streak, says The New York Times. For a recent birthday present, his current wife had his childhood home shipped from Oklahoma to his Mesa Vista ranch in Texas. "We're putting the house back to what it was like when I was a little boy," says Pickens. He can cut an eccentric figure, admits the Dallas Morning News: few on Wall Street are probably aware of "the depth of his lifelong fascination for Bobwhite Quail". But this lifelong hunter still knows how to command attention. He shocked journalists on a recent tour of the ranch by suddenly unleashing a volley of blasts from his shot-gun.

Yet even Pickens' enemies bow to his energy market knowledge. His adoption of the green cause after an earlier conversion to Peak Oil theory is all the more powerful in Texas given his former status as an "oil prophet". Hundreds of followers are signing up to his vision of turning America's great plains into "the Saudi Arabia of wind energy", says USA Today.

Once, America's new wind capital, Sweetwater, was famous only for its annual "Rattlesnake Round-up". Now "you can drive for 150 miles... and never be out of sight of a giant wind turbine". Pickens' farm is still being built, but he wants it to be central to a new renewables industry that will supply a third of the US's energy needs inside a decade. Whether this is feasible or affordable is an open question, says Newsweek. But his "sense of timing is beyond doubt". Both presidential candidates have backed him. As Barack Obama concludes: "T Boone Pickens is right."