Dear Mr. Pickens,
I saw your plan in two different You Tube videos. As a Caltech grad (MS in EE, 1954), I was impressed. IMHO, we, as a nation, should consider all of the energy sources that you enumerated along with any new, "out of the box" technologies, but the "playing field" should be leveled. All government interference in the energy markets should be stopped. This will allow all technologies to compete--the market will select those technologies that are most cost-effective. It was government regulations, subsidies, and taxes that brought us the "energy crisis."
The energy crisis cannot be completely solved as long as energy production depends upon consumption of material (mass). Our scientific community tells us that that is impossible, but that hasn't stopped people from doing just that.
Consider, for example. WaterGas, also called Brown's Gas, HHO Gas, Hydrogen on Demand, Oxyhydrogen, and HydrOxy, has been known and used since the 1920s. WaterGas is made by disassociating water into it's constituent parts--hydrogen and oxygen. This is usually accomplished with an electric current and called electrolysis.
Long ago the principle use for WaterGas was in a torch for heating, cutting, and welding metal. In recent times it has been used in automobiles to either decrease or eliminate the consumption of fossil fuel. The beauty of using WaterGas as the only fuel for a car is that it uses water to produce the gaseous fuel, burns the gas for the mechanical power to propel the vehicle, captures the combustion products (water vapor), and recycles the water. Thus, a WaterGas powered vehicle would produce no pollutants and would not require any pollution control hardware. The disadvantage of WaterGas as the only fuel for a diesel engine is that it will not work.
This link downloads an article that discusses both automotive uses of WaterGas with emphasis on eliminating fossil fuel entirely. It is clear that while the automobile engine can generate enough electricity to power an electrolyzer capable of increasing the mileage by up to, perhaps, 20% eliminating the need for fossil fuel entirely is a different matter.
The 3 references below explain the physics that supports an electrolyzer that produces enough WaterGas to power an automobile while the electricity needed to electrolyze the water is generated by the auto's engine. This means that the electrolyzer produces WaterGas at a rate up to ten (10) times the rate per ampere that Michael Faraday determined 160 years ago. The Michael Faraday limit has been firmly fixed in science because scientists eschewed non-equilibrium, asymmetric electrical systems which, thermodynamically, are non-equilibrium steady state (NESS) systems. Actually the possibilities for asymmetric electrical systems were removed from the mathematical model used for electrical engineering around the beginning of the 20th century.
I have more to say, but this is probably already too long.
Larry Brown
Your Eyes and Ears in SW Oregon
Now using a Mac Mini (Apple)