By Rebecca Jarvis, Richard Coolidge and Jordyn Phelps
Power Players
In spite of a U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in the Middle East, oil prices have dropped below $3 a gallon across much of the country in recent months. It’s an uncommon confluence of events that billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens said wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago.
“If this had been 10 years ago … you would’ve had oil up $50 a barrel,” Pickens, who has been dubbed “The Oracle of Oil” for his uncanny knack for predicting oil prices, told “Power Players” in a recent interview conducted at the Concordia Summit in New York City.
It’s quite a shift from just a few years ago in 2008, when gas prices across the country spiked to as much as $4 and $5 a gallon. And the reason for the change, Pickens said, has to do with a growth in U.S. oil production.
“The United States has changed the whole landscape for oil, I’m talking about globally,” he said. “We’re using more oil, we’re using 92 million barrels in the world every day, and that’s the most oil that we’ve ever used in the world. So, oil demand is going up, and, by golly, oil supply – the additions that have been added to it – come from the United States.”
So, does the recent boom in U.S. oil output mean that sky-high prices at the pump are a thing of the past?
The answer to that question, Pickens believes, lies in our ability to transition to natural gas.
While other countries, such as Pakistan and China, have cut back on their reliance on traditional gasoline – and consequently, fuel costs – the United States has yet to make such a transition.
“You don’t have to go through Congress in Pakistan. If a prime minister wants natural gas, he says, ‘We’re going to natural gas.’ Same thing in China,” Pickens said. “Here [in the United States] it’s pretty well left up to the markets, and so the way you get to the same answer is because it’s cheaper and cleaner.”
And though the price of natural gas actually has been lower than traditional gasoline in the U.S. for some years, Pickens said the domestic car market has been slower to respond than some other countries.
“Today, if you went out and shopped for a natural gas passenger car, you know what you see?” Pickens asked. “One Honda GX Civic and you can get the Ford F-150 pickup. If we were in Paris, France, tonight, and we were going down to shop for a passenger car, you’d see 40 that you could buy.”
Another factor in why the U.S. doesn’t have more natural gas-powered cars, Pickens said, has to do with an absence of stations with natural gas pumps. But he qualified, “you can’t go build service stations all over the United States … unless you have a market for that.”
In the meantime, Pickens said the answer for tapping the market of U.S. consumers interested in the natural gas car market is to fuel up at home.
“For your car and my car, the way you’re going to fuel it is in your garage. You can just hook off your natural gas,” he said. “Natural gas, from your garage, is less than a dollar a gallon. It’s what it costs. It is cheap.”
But he stopped short of predicting whether natural gas cars will be a prevalent presence on U.S. roads within the next ten years.
“I don’t know,” Pickens said. “I’ve been so wrong on that one. If you go back and look at Boone’s record, do you know what you’ll see? Good direction, questionable timing. I’ve thought things were going to happen a lot quicker than they did, numerous times.”
“Do you know what that’s cost me?” Pickens asked rhetorically. “A lot of money.”
Pickens has a lot to lose with an impressive net worth of $1 billion, but one thing the oil magnate said he doesn’t lose sleep over is protecting his assets in the age of modern technology. That’s because Pickens doesn’t use electronic accounts; he opts for a yellow legal pad for his personal record-keeping.
“I don’t have any e-mail,” Pickens said. “And when the cyber guy came and said, ‘Let me tell you, they will have you so fast, before you even know, they got what they wanted,’ I said … ‘Well, no I don’t do that. It’s all on my yellow legal pad and I take it home with me.”
To learn more about what life is like as T. Boone Pickens, and to watch him learn about phone “apps,” check out this episode of “Power Players.”
ABC News’ David Miller, Ali Dukakis and Tom Thornton contributed to this episode.