Yesterday, billionaire energy investor T. Boone Pickens, Jr., was at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and said that the price of crude oil will continue to rise. Pickens said:

The position is long, not short. I covered the short position, it was a mistake on my part. We missed.

According to Bloomberg’s Daniel Whitten:

Pickens said he thought oil was approaching $125 a barrel. Oil will eventually reach $150 per barrel, he said, while cautioning “I won’t be investing in $150 oil.”

According to the “Oracle of Oil,” world supplies won’t surpass the current 85 million barrels a day due to high depletion rates of existing wells. OPEC has not increased production this year. Whitten noted world oil demand during the four years ending 2008 is rising at an average annualized pace of about 1.4%, according to the International Energy Agency.

The Bloomberg reporter also said that Pickens plans to invest $10 billion in 4,000 megawatts of wind projects within the next several years. Pickens, who expects a minimum 25% return on this investment, said, “We are going to put a lot of money into wind next month.” According to Jim Landers of the Dallas Morning News, the founder and chairman of Dallas-based BP Capital LLC is not waiting around that long. Today, Landers wrote:

Dallas energy magnate T. Boone Pickens said Thursday that he plans to execute contracts as early as next week for $1.5 billion in wind turbines across four Panhandle counties to generate power for North Texas.

Mr. Pickens said he also hopes to start acquisition in May for a right-of-way to transmit the power and large volumes of aquifer water to the Dallas area from ranch and farming land around Pampa.

Pickens called Mesa Power LLC’s wind/water activities in Roberts, Gray, Hemphill and Wheeler counties “the biggest project in the world,” with a combined cost of $13 billion. It’s expected to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity by 2011 and 4,000 megawatts once the project is finished in 2014.

Sources:

“Pickens Reverses Position to Bet on Higher Oil Prices (Update4)”
Daniel Whitten
Bloomberg, April 17, 2008

“Pickens to import water, wind power to North Texas”
Jim Landers
Dallas Morning News, April 18, 2008

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