Securing Americas Energy Future - Essay Example

By the time of writing this article, Pickens had estimated that a huge chunk of the oil consumed in America is imported. In fact, he estimated that 70% of the oil is made up of imports. The fact that oil is the key driver of the American economy, cannot go without saying that a significant share of our energy resources is derived from other countries. This is not only detrimental to our economy, but to the environment and national security as well.

Pickens comes up with a raft of proposals that will help this country to reduce its foreign oil imports by a third. He believes that this is a necessary course since the global demand for oil is increasing by the day if the emergence of China and India is anything to go by. To begin with, Pickens proposes the use of Wind Power. This is because he considers wind to be not only renewable and clean, but it is 100% domestic as well. In addition, America has the largest wind reserves as opposed to any other country across the globe.

By doing this, it will take the “energy generated by wind and use it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants.” In other words, the use of wind energy will go a long way in ensuring that natural gas is solely used as a transportation fuel. More often than not, natural gas is considered as the form of energy that can sustain the transportation sector by virtue of it being clean, cheap, and in abundance. By taking this route, it will drive more efforts towards the development and manufacture of natural-gas-powered vehicles (Levi, 56).

Furthermore, our dependence on wind energy will help to plug the deficit of unemployment. In the process, this new development will be a major investment “in the heartland, creating room for hundreds of thousands of jobs” in the next few decades. This move will create an avenue for use of other sources of energy such as biomass, solar, and ethanol. Taking a step in this direction will save the country from the excessive carbon footprint which has been a major issue of concern to the wellbeing of our environment. These alternative forms of energy will help to determine how the leadership of this country can bring about that brand-new day. This can be done by exploring how the American population can benefit from creating a twenty-first-century civilization built on a foundation of clean and renewable energy sources, and a more energy-efficient social structure (Pickens, n.p).

In the long run, the process of creating transmission corridors for wind and solar energies must commence without any further delay. In the long run, freeing this country from the York of foreign oil imports and modernizing it as a clean-energy nation during the coming decades will give us a challenge as great in scope as any other major project in human history. Read More