Forum on Energy Issues and Innovation

Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009, 1 p.m.
UT Dallas Conference Center
Free and open to the public

The Forum on Energy Issues and Innovation is a lecture series devoted to reflecting the growing emphasis at UT Dallas on energy and natural resources stewardship, which is widely regarded as one of the most important endeavors of our time. These lectures are intended to complement and expand upon the University's coordinated research in four primary areas:

Intelligent systems for energy production, transmission and utilization.

New energy-storage technologies that reduce the over-capacity required to meet peak loads.

Application of nano-scale science and technology to renewable energy generation, including wind, solar and geothermal.

The development of a living laboratory to increase awareness of the possibilities to live and work in an energy-neutral and
natural-resource-neutral environment.

Inaugural Speaker: T. Boone Pickens

Founder and chairman of BP Capital Management, Boone Pickens is principally responsible for the formulation of the energy futures investment strategy of the BP Capital Commodity Fund and the BP Capital Equity Fund. With more than $4 billion under management, BP Capital manages one of the nation's most successful energy-oriented investment funds. Pickens frequently uses his wealth of experience in the oil and gas industry in the evaluation of potential equity investments and energy sector themes. He has not been shy in predicting oil and gas prices, and more often than not he has been uncannily accurate.

Pickens is also aggressively pursuing a wide range of other business interests, from water marketing and ranch development initiatives to Clean Energy, a company he founded and of which he is the largest shareholder. Through Mesa Water, Pickens is the largest private holder of permitted groundwater rights in the United States. Clean Energy is advancing the use of natural gas as a cleaner-burning and more cost-effective transportation fuel alternative to gasoline and diesel.

The Pickens Plan

The Pickens Plan calls for making use of the country's tremendous resources in wind power and clean natural gas to build a bridge to the future a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives and buying time to develop even greater new technologies and distribution systems.

The Plan calls for building new wind generation facilities that will produce 20 percent of U.S. electricity while using the country's abundant domestic natural gas supply as a transportation fuel and for power generation. The Plan calls for using this combination of domestic energies to replace more than one-third of foreign oil imports within 10 years.

The Founding Sponsor for the Forum is Texas Institute. Texas Institute is an independent, nonprofit research institute conducting client-sponsored research and advancing the development of sustainable technology solutions for government, businesses, universities, and other organizations.