Pickens: Oil Going to Remain Above $100 a Barrel

"I can't play day trades, whether it's down one day, up the next, the volatility just eats my lunch," he said. "I've got to make a far-out play and stick with it."

He repeated his recent change of heart about alternative energy.

"We're spending about $1.5 billion a day -- $500 to $600 billion a year -- on imported oil," he noted. "That's four times the cost of the Iraqi war. We can't continue to do that. In 10 years you will have transferred wealth from the United States to the producing countries of about $5 or $6 trillion. That won't work. I'm not sure what it's going to do to us to remove that much wealth out of this country. We have got to get on alternative fuels in the United States. That's all there is to it."

Pickens says he's bullish on natural gas as well as oil, and he has a portfolio to prove it.

"My...picks for natural gas would be Cheaspeake , Exco, Sandridge, and , if you're going to play the natural-gas fueling deal, you'd go to Clean Energy Fuelson the Nasdaq," he said. "If you're going to play oil, on the domestics, I would say that Continental Resources and Denbury are the two best, plus Suncor, the Canadian oil-sands one. Those are all in my portfolio."

In fact, Pickens is the largest shareholder in Clean Energy Fuels.