Gulf Oil Leak Could Last A Year: T. Boone Pickens

Getty Images Oilman T. Boone Pickens said in a CNBC interview that the BP oil spill could last a year.

It's possible that the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could last a year, oil man T. Boone Pickens told CNBC Monday, citing a similar leak.

“If you go back and look at the well that I’m comparing it to—Ixtoc—which was a Mexican well in the Gulf of Mexico…that went for 290 days,” Pickens said, referring to the 1979 oil spill.

Despite the BP

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[BP  Loading...      ()] accident in the Gulf of Mexico, Pickens said in an interview with CNBC that a six-month moratorium on deep water drilling “should not have been done.” He explained that the rigs would likely move out of the Gulf of Mexico to somewhere they would be able to work. By the time they get back in, said Pickens, a year could pass and production won’t happen for six months to another year after that.

“There’s only been one accident in the deep water, which is the one we’re faced with right now,” Pickens said. “There have been only two wells that have caused us a problem like this in the last 50 years, which was in 1969 in Santa Barbara and this one.”

Pickens said that the United States needs an energy policy that will free it from dependence on oil from the Middle East, a promise President Obama made while campaigning. “He’s been there two years," Pickens said about Obama, "And we don’t have an energy policy to get us off the oil from the Middle East.”

“The wind and the solar do not replace oil,” said Pickens who launched the Pickens Plan a couple of years ago that aims to reduce foreign oil through alternative energy sources like solar, wind and natural gas. “Seventy percent of all the oil we use in the United States goes for transportation.”

“None of those,” Pickens said, referring to wind, solar and nuclear energy, “will move an automobile or a 18-wheeler.”

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