CNBC interviewed legendary oil investor T. Boone Pickens, Jr., yesterday down at the NYMEX. CNBC’s Melissa Francis asked the CEO of BP Capital about the direction of crude oil in coming days:

CNBC: Where do you think we’re going from here? Are we going to hit $100 or are we going to go below $100?
PICKENS: I don’t think we’ll go below $100. I think they’ll start to support it, is what will happen, and they’ll cut production. They like it, they, OPEC, likes it up here. It’s fun. You know, their revenues this year will be one-trillion two-hundred fifty billion dollars.
CNBC: You think they’re going to cut and defend $100 on September 9? You think they’ll cut production?
PICKENS: Yeah, I do, I do. I think they will.

You can view the 4 minute 55 second interview here.

Source:

T. Boone Pickens, Jr., Interview
CNBC, September 2, 2008

Legendary oil investor T. Boone Pickens, Jr., has a new forecast for the price of crude oil. According to CBS News yesterday:

In town for the Democratic convention to promote his “Pickens Plan” for alternative energy, billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens predicted $200 a barrel oil within three years.

“In two or three years, we’re going to be at $200 a barrel—could be $300 a barrel for oil,” Pickens said inside the “Big Tent,” a complex outside the Pepsi Center set up for bloggers. “And consequently, our economy is going to struggle and our security is just—it’s a disaster.”

In an earlier post, I noted that back on July 22, Pickens told U.S. lawmakers that oil prices would hit $300 a barrel in 10 years if the United States failed to reduce its dependence on foreign imports.

Source:

“T. Boone Pickens Predicts $200 A Barrel Oil”
CBS News, August 27, 2008

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T. Boone Pickens, Jr., appeared on CNBC this morning. The CEO of BP Capital told CNBC’s Becky Quick that he is still long on crude oil and natural gas.

CNBC: When we talked to you last, you were long on crude oil, and you were long on natural gas too, I believe. We’ve seen a really big turnaround. Did you- I know you said that when it turned, it was going to turn fast- but, did you anticipate that turn before, or did you change your positions?
PICKENS: My positions are not as big as they were, but I’m still long.
CNBC: You’re still long oil, so you’re still thinking it goes up from here?
PICKENS: Well, I don’t know, I think you could still pull back some.

You can view the 7 minute 16 second segment here (video two).

Source:

Boone Pickens Interview
CNBC, August 8, 2008

So much for Boone Pickens’ foray into technology. Yesterday, Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the legendary energy investor dumped all his shares of Yahoo. Kopytoff wrote:

Billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens excoriated Yahoo’s management for failing to reach an agreement to sell all or part of the Web portal to Microsoft Corp.

Pickens, who bought 10 million Yahoo shares in May in hopes that an acquisition was imminent, said Monday that he got tired of waiting for a deal and sold his entire holdings at a loss.

“I think that Yahoo management was pathetic,” Pickens told The Chronicle’s editorial board.

Source:

“Pickens rips Yahoo management, says he dumped shares at a loss”
Verne Kopytoff
San Francisco Chronicle, July 29, 2008

On a day when American politicians desperately tried to knock down the price of crude oil, energy investor T. Boone Pickens, Jr., added his two cents to the debate with his forecast of where the price of oil was going. Reuters’ Timothy Gardner wrote yesterday:

Oil prices will hit $300 a barrel in 10 years if the United States fails to reduce its dependence on foreign imports, billionaire oil investor T. Boone Pickens told U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday.

The United States imports nearly 70 percent of its oil and Pickens said the world’s top petroleum-consuming nation would import 80 percent in a decade if it does not aggressively tap its own natural gas and renewable resources.

“If we continue to drift, oil will hit $300 a barrel in 10 years,” Pickens testified at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Source:

“Pickens sees $300 oil unless U.S. cuts crude imports”
Timothy Gardner
Reuters, July 22, 2008

The latest forecast of legendary oil investor T. Boone Pickens, Jr., calls for the price of oil to remain around $150 a barrel for a while. From CNBC’s website this morning:

“I’ll stick with $150 (per barrel),” Pickens, who is also CEO of BP Capital, told “Squawk Box”. “Demand going down, that’s what will bring this thing in better balance”.

Asked where he saw the price of oil going in the next two years, he said: “You could get it back down to about 100.”

The “Oracle of Oil” is still convinced that oil prices are being driven by fundamentals, not speculators. From the CNBC piece:

The high oil prices are not determined by speculators and the weak dollar but by supply and demand, Pickens also said.

“It (the price of oil) isn’t driven by speculation,” Pickens said, adding that for 85 million barrels of oil production, demand is around 86 million barrels.

The legendary oilman told “Squawk Box” that the United States currently imports 70% of the oil it needs, compared to only 42% in 1990 and 24% in the 70s. This arrangement is costing the country $700 billion annually.

The good news is, Pickens has a plan for tackling the U.S. energy crisis. From USA Today this morning:

Today, Pickens will take the wraps off what he’s calling the Pickens Plan for cutting the USA’s demand for foreign oil by more than a third in less than a decade. To promote it, he is bankrolling what his aides say will be the biggest public policy ad campaign ever. The website, www.pickensplan.com, goes live today.

Jay Rosser, Pickens’ ever-present public relations man, promises that Pickens’ face will be seen on Americans’ televisions this fall almost as frequently as John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s.

“Neither presidential candidate is talking about solving the oil problem. So we’re going to make ‘em talk about it,” Pickens says.

He pointed out that the situation transcends partisan politics:

“This is not about Republicans vs. Democrats,” Pickens says. “This is about saving our country from the ruination of spending $700 billion a year on oil imports. Ninety days after the oil hits our shores, it’s all burned up, and we’ve got nothing to show for it. But they (foreign oil producers) still have our money. It’s killing our economy.”

The Pickens Plan relies heavily on wind and natural gas. USA Today’s Dan Reed wrote:

Getting lots more electricity with wind is only half of the Pickens Plan. Increasing wind-power production by itself won’t reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil because most of that oil is consumed as gasoline.

The key, Pickens says, is that wind energy can be used as a substitute for natural gas now burned to generate electricity. That, in turn, will make far more natural gas available for use as a transportation fuel. Pickens’ plan is to produce enough wind power within 10 years to divert 20% of the natural gas now used to fuel power plants for use in cars and trucks.

Sources:

“Pickens Sticks with $150 Oil; Could Fall to $100”
CNBC, July 8, 2008

“Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens wants to supplant oil with wind”
Dan Reed
USA Today, July 8, 2008

This morning, I read a piece by BusinessWeek associate editor Susan Berfield, who wrote that legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens, Jr., has been investing in water, or “blue gold,” as it’s known to some. Berfield wrote yesterday afternoon:

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property…

“There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing,” he says.

Why would the “Oracle of Oil” take a special interest in water when there’s other resources he could turn a profit from? Berfield explained:

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water—or what many are calling “blue gold”—will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. Pickens understands that. And while Texas is unusually lax in its laws about pumping groundwater, the rush to control water resources is gathering speed around the planet…

Into this environment comes Pickens… So far he has spent $100 million and eight years on his project and still has not found any city in Texas willing to buy his water. But like many others, Pickens believes there’s a fortune to be made in slaking the thirst of a rapidly growing population. If he pumps as much as he can, he could sell about $165 million worth of water to Dallas each year.

Source:

“There Will Be Water”
Susan Berfield
BusinessWeek, June 13, 2008

Earlier this morning, the Stockpickr staff announced on TheStreet.com that it had reviewed the stock portfolio of legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens, Jr. They said:

Recently, noted oil investor T. Boone Pickens announced that he expects prices to reach $150 this year. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at the stocks that he owns.

Pickens was the highest-paid hedge fund manager for 2005, earning $1.4 billion and providing a return of about 300% for the investors in his fund, BP Capital.

Stockpickr has reviewed the stocks that he owns and developed a portfolio of the top T. Boone Pickens stocks.

The Stockpickr staff invited readers to view the top stocks belonging to the “Oracle of Oil.” You can access this information here.

Source:

“Portfolio Spotlight: T. Boone Pickens”
Stockpickr Staff
TheStreet.com, June 11, 2008

Responding to news that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the watchdog for U.S. commodity transactions, was investigating for possible oil price manipulation, legendary oil investor T. Boone Pickens, Jr., said in interviews yesterday at an American Wind Energy Association conference in Houston that:

There’s nothing to it to start with. That’s not what’s happened. You have 85 million barrels a day of oil available in the global energy market and 86.4 million barrels a day of demand. So the price of oil is going to go up until you can kill demand.

The CFTC’s actions can be attributed to “trying to find a scapegoat and place blame for it when what you have is demand that is greater than supply,” according to Pickens. The famous oilman explained:

You’ve got to have a commodity market, because a producer has to have an opportunity to hedge when they feel like the risk is becoming too great for them. For every hedger, you have to have a speculator.

On Monday, the founder and chairman of Dallas-based BP Capital LLC confirmed his earlier forecast that crude oil will reach $150 a barrel this year. He said:

We’re using 400,000 barrels of oil less today than we did a year ago, but the Chinese are now using 500,000 barrels greater than they did last year. So whatever we kill in the way of demand, they pick up in their demand. You’re gong to bid for the oil, and the highest bidder’s going to get the oil until you finally kill demand with price.

Source:

“Pickens Says CFTC Probe of Oil a ‘Waste of Time’ (Update1)”
Margot Habiby, Edward Klump
Bloomberg, June 3, 2008

Here’s an interesting story I came across this morning. Yesterday, Fortune’s Todd Woody wrote about legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens, Jr., who talked to the magazine’s staff about none other than— Yahoo. Woody wrote:

The billionaire oilman has bought 10 million Yahoo shares and is backing Carl Icahn’s bid to oust the Internet company’s board in the aftermath of the failed (so far) deal with Microsoft.

“I’m just coat-tailing Carl on that,” said Pickens, who celebrated his 80th birthday last Thursday. He said he had not discussed Yahoo with Icahn before buying up Yahoo stock. “I didn’t talk to Carl. Hell, I can’t even write an e-mail,” said Pickens.

“I’m not even sure what Yahoo does,” he added.

Blind faith? With a net worth of $14 billion, Icahn IS the 46th richest man in the world. Woody added:

According to Pickens, after Microsoft walked away from its $47.5 billion bid on May 3, he called his office and asked what Yahoo was trading for. “When they said around $21, I said buy 1 million shares but they misheard me and bought 10 million,” he said, pausing a beat before cracking a smile.

As Yahoo (YHOO) is trading a little over $27 a share this morning, Pickens can afford to smile…

Source:

“T. Boone Pickens on Yahoo”
Todd Woody
Fortune (on CNN Money), May 27, 2008