Solving for the Unknowns: The Pickens Plan

This Yahoo! News article has me wondering again about the pros and cons of the Pickens Plan:

"Billionaire T. Boone Pickens expects to know within 100 days of Barack Obama taking over as president in January whether the U.S. government is going to adopt part of his ambitious and controversial energy plan.
The plan calls for an eventual overhaul of the power grid and Pickens is also betting on huge growth in wind power. But he said, as a start, the United States can move toward using natural gas in trucks as well as more renewable power."

A couple of months ago the Climate Progress blog posted a criticism of the Pickens Plan. According to the author, Earl Killian, the proposal to build out a wind energy infrastructure is attractive, but converting ground transportation to compressed natural gas makes no sense.

CNG Trucking

For Pickens, converting long-haul trucking to CNG is probably the most attractive part of the plan. Killian asserts that, in order to make a dent in foreign oil dependency, we would also need to convert small cars to alternative fuels.

I think Killian may have set up a strawman, although he does provide evidence that Pickens is talking about both trucks and small cars. Regardless, his analysis is really interesting.

Killian finds that plugin hybrids would get more range from a given volume of natural gas, converted to electricity by a power utility, than would cars which ran directly on CNG:

It seems pretty straightforward that electric vehicles beat CNG vehicles almost 2:1, even using existing NG power plants. If the US upgraded its NG power plants to be 60% efficient, instead of 39% efficient, we would have 54% more TWh, or even better, use less 35% less NG.

As noted, Pickens is focusing on big trucks, not small cars. It would be interesting to see an assessment based on data from existing CNG truck and bus fleets.

Wind

Killian and others have a more favorable view of Pickens' wind power proposal. They are concerned that wind power could be unreliable and unpredictable since, well, wind varies. The Pickens Plan addresses this problem by building excess capacity into the wind grid, and by pointing out that it's unlikely the entire midwest wind corridor would be calm at any given time.

This seems reasonable given the experiences of other countries. For example, Wikipedia notes that Denmark, which derives 20% of its electricity from wind power, has suffered "no major problems" with wind variability.

Killian focuses on energy potential, so he doesn't assess the environmental consequences of building out the wind corridor. Aside from the wind turbines themselves, we'd also need lots of long-distance transmission lines, much of it running through land which has so far escaped damage by humans.

Sideline: Rail

I thought that rail was more fuel efficient than trucking for long-haul shipment of goods, and that trucking came to prominence by way of regulation. If so, that would beg questions:

1. What would be the benefits of changing those regulations to reward efficiency?
2. Would we be better off building up rail infrastructure, than converting trucking fleets to CNG?

Google says my memory of regulatory history is wrong. From "Basic Economics", by Thomas Sowell:

[The I.C.C.] sought — and received from Congress — broader authority under the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, in order to restrict the activities of truckers [emph. added]. This allowed railroads to survive under new economic conditions, despite truck competition that was more efficient for various kinds of freight hauling.

The CSX website claims that rail freight is three times more fuel efficient than long-haul trucking.

Since 1980, through technology and innovation, the railroad industry has improved locomotive fuel efficiency by over 80%.

So question 2 is still worth asking.