Posted on 01/22/2018 10:35:21 AM PST by sodpoodle
Late last year, T. Boone Pickens was back at it, drilling for oil. On his 65,000-acre ranch in the Texas Panhandle, an expanse full of wildflowers and rolling hills, Mr. Pickens, 89, had erected a $6 million rig and started pumping fracking fluid into the earth. Decades past his heyday as a self-made oil mogul and old-school corporate raider, his fortune and his public profile diminished, Mr. Pickens was still hoping to strike it rich, just as he had done some 60 years ago as a young wildcatter in Amarillo. The well has begun producing, but Mr. Pickens — who less than two years ago insisted, “I’m not going to retire” — isn’t sticking around to see the results. Not long after drilling commenced, he put the Mesa Vista Ranch up for sale. The asking price: a cool $250 million. Then on Jan. 12, Mr. Pickens did the unthinkable: He effectively announced his retirement, shuttering BP Capital, his hedge fund. Though Mr. Pickens, a famous fitness buff who once challenged President Barack Obama to an exercise competition, is still involved in his business affairs, his retirement ends a larger-than-life, only-in-America career. “Everything is big in Texas, and T. Boone is the personification of that,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “He bets big. He has big ideas. And he puts big numbers behind it.” With an outsize personality and aggressive business tactics that landed him on the cover of Time magazine, Mr. Pickens became one of the few businessmen in the 1980s recognizable to wide segments of America. His influence is still widely felt. Mr. Pickens was an early advocate for shareholder rights and insisting that executives be compensated with stock.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
I guess his ‘wind farm’ didn’t pan out.................
Was thinking the same thing.
He wants to spend more time as a community activist.
/that is sarcasm.
Much of west Texas is festooned with windmills.
Recall a great story about Pickens he said work ethic is the most important trait for business - he had a paper route during the depression, when his mother asked how much he had saved he had almost $300 at 12 years old during the depression!
I guess his ‘wind farm’ didn’t pan out
if they won’t pay for themselves in west Texas, they will never pay for themselves
Wind farms are the worst idea - they are not very productive, are eyesores on a landscape and cause bird deaths by the millions.
There is more wind turbulence caused by traffic - on highways - which could be harnessed by ground level turbines. Hardly visible and easily serviced.
Surprised Oklahoma State hasn’t made it official and renamed themselves, “T. Boone Pickens U”.
Pickens abandoned his wind energy projects in 2010 in favor of Nat gas.....................
Now if each of those was connected to its own oil well...
Oklahoma State owes him a lot. I remember the old aluminum benches at Lewis Field.
Now first class facilities and well paid coaches are at least making them competitive.
Great guy but I remember how he jumped in with both feet to the whole wind power game:
I’m pretty sure that came up snake eyes.
Wonder if that includes water rights, or they’re part of what he sold off for $103 million already.
Yeah, painful to sit on without some kind of pad.
America will be better off with him gone. He was a huge Obama supporter in 2008, and even backed his green technology plans to shutdown the fossil fuel industry.
The guy used his money to help get Obama elected. So in my book he is just as responsible for tens of millions of small businesses shutting down while putting tens of millions of Americans, like myself out of work.
T. Boone Picken, you can kiss my ass, and take the next bus to hell.
Wildcatters like Pickens have drilled many a hole before striking it rich.
Sometimes the "hole" comes up dry.
T. Boone Pickens is the epitome of entrepreneurialism and the American can-do spirit. The country needs more guys like him.
http://www.arresearchpublication.com/images/shortpdf/1427042611_1158.pdf
Good explanation of highway turbines to harness vehicle turbulence.
Ah windmills...
Was watching a movie and windmills came up and the cowboy (James Stewart??) said the ranch had two windmills but they tore one down because there was only enough wind for one of them....
WV has quite a few of them and everytime I go into a store or business with a windmill in sight I ask if the bird population has gone down AND is it true that it takes electricity to run them to cool off the valley?
That usually ‘starts it’.....
All that energy saving crap and still high gasoline prices and taxes, high unemployment and ALL that coal just sitting there ‘rusting’ away....
Kind of sorta like Venezuela some of the richest oil deposits in the world and they are starving to death...
Reminds one of the old tell the Arabs to drink that oil if they priced themselves out of business.
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