What’s the renewable fossil fuel equation? According to CNBC’s recounting of Pickens’s appearance on that network on Tuesday morning:

Developing wind and solar power could lower the use of natural gas in some instances, he said. Some of that natural gas could be redirected to uses normally reserved for oil, like transportation. That, in turn, could lead to a 38 percent reduction in the use of foreign energy supplies, he concluded.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Mr. Pickens plans a long media campaign “to promote his energy policy ideas — which align perfectly with his business investments. He’ll spend tens of millions of dollars on television and Web advertising and will make talk show appearances along the way”:

Mr. Pickens agreed that the shift to natural gas and renewable power will take time. He isn’t trying to address current prices at the pump; Americans will have to find ways to live with expensive gasoline, he said.

And he acknowledges that building natural gas pipelines to every service station, erecting more wind turbines, and stringing the transmission lines to service them, would cost billions of dollars.

But with the U.S. spending $700 billion a year on foreign oil, investing several billion in wind turbines and new transmission lines would be an attractive trade-off, he says.

The businessman also announced Tuesday that he was investing $10 billion on a 4,000 megawatt wind power deal in Pampa, Texas. He referenced an “unbelievable wind corridor from Sweetwater, Texas to the Canadian border” as a possible site for 150,000 megawatts. Pickens toured wind turbines in Sweetwater last week with national media outlets. An Abilene Reporter News story last week quoted Pickens as saying “we’ve already bought the turbines for the first 1,000 megawatts, and we’ll start construction in the summer of 2010.”

Pickens has also launched Clean Energy Fuels, a company that runs natural-gas filling stations for fleet vehicles, according to a MarketWatch story.

Pickens doesn’t plan to discuss energy policy in a bubble; he plans to push the presidential candidates to address the issue. According to the Dallas News, “He aims to make energy a central issue in the presidential election. He’ll challenge the candidates to go beyond pandering on gasoline prices to create real energy plans.”

Actual text of the energy policy is not yet available but the “Pickens Plan” is outlined here. This morning in the Wall Street Journal, Pickens argues that “can be accomplished within 10 years if this country takes decisive and bold steps immediately. This plan dramatically reduces our dependence on foreign oil and lowers the cost of transportation. It invests in the heartland, creating thousands of new jobs. It substantially reduces America's carbon footprint and uses existing, proven technology. It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation. It will build a bridge to the future, giving us the time to develop new technologies.”

According to the federal Energy Department’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy division:

House Bill 7135 requires the Florida Public Service Commission to establish a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) that will specify a minimum percentage of retail electricity sales that must be supplied by renewable energy, but the bill does not set the minimum standard or a timeline. Instead, the bill requires the commission to prepare a draft rule by February 2009 and present it to the legislature for approval. The bill also requires the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to create a cap-and-trade regulatory program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from major emitters. Again, the bill sets no specific limits and requires any program to be ratified by the legislature.

The Energy Department outlines the other major provisions in the bill here.

I think biofuels could grow from a mere one percent of the world fuels mix today to as much as 7 or 10 percent over the next couple of decades.... I want us [Shell] to lead in that space; and to that end we decided in 2007 to increase our rate of investment in them — quadruple it, in fact.

To hear some tell it, all of today’s, or “first-generation,” biofuels are a disaster and should be written off. But let’s be clear: when it comes to truly sustainable, low carbon biofuels, we can’t open the taps overnight.

We still need more innovations to lower the costs and raise the yields. We still need to learn more about sustainable production. We still need to develop markets and use them to scale up capacity. We still need first-generation biofuels, both to meet mandates and to build capacity for the next generation.

Shell is in the biofuels game to win:

In addition to using conventional fossil fuels more wisely, we also are working hard to develop alternative, low-CO2 sources of energy. In the first half of this decade, we invested more than $1 billion in alternative energies including GTL, hydrogen, and biofuels.

We’ve been working for thirty years on turning natural gas to liquid — what we call GTL...In fact, we already blend it with conventional diesel fuel and sell it in more than 4,000 Shell service stations in Europe and Thailand.

We have teamed up with a number of major cities around the world to see if GTL could have a positive impact on air quality and CO2 emissions in busy urban environments. The results are promising. The most recent test data, announced in Shanghai last September, showed that Shell GTL Fuel used in buses can reduce CO2 by 4%, particles matters by 35%, and black smoke emissions by 70% compared to conventional diesel.

Hydrogen is a possibility for the future, but biofuels — though not a “silver bullet” — is the near-term answer, according to Routs:

There are obstacles to be overcome, but hydrogen could become a commercially viable transport fuel in the years to come.... Unfortunately, the widespread use of hydrogen as a power source could take a decade or more. We need to find nearer-term alternatives, which is where biofuels come in....

In 2007 we sold more than 5 billion liters — mainly to meet government mandates — and we continue to build our capability.

If not managed carefully, they can sometimes compete for land with food, consume a lot of water, or disrupt biodiversity or local cultures. It varies tremendously but some of today’s biofuels also deliver only modest CO2 benefits — compared to conventional gasoline or diesel. Looking to the future, these disadvantages could be overcome by next-generation biofuels, which are already starting to show their promise. These are biofuels that use non-food raw materials and that deliver CO2 savings of as much as 90 % compared to conventional gasoline and diesel. They are going to be vital part of the fuels mix in the future.

The full text of his speech can be read here.

The “out of the suburbs, back to the city” narrative rests more on anecdote than demographic or economic fact. Yes, high gas prices and rising sub-prime mortgage defaults are hurting some suburban communities, particularly newly built ones on the periphery. But the suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of U.S. families — and people aren’t leaving those communities in droves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, many suburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies are tied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in terms of job creation and population growth.

The ominous predictions that the end of suburbia is at hand echo those in the 1970s, when there was also a run-up in gasoline prices. Then it was neo-Malthusians such as biologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of “The Population Bomb,” who argued that the idea of suburbia was unsustainable because it eats up so much land and energy. But suburban growth continued as people bought more fuel-efficient cars and companies moved jobs to the periphery, which cut commuting times. Contrary to pundits’ forecasts, during this decade of high energy prices, the country’s urban populations, for only the first time in recent history, actually fell, according to a census analysis by economist Jordan Rappaport at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

But today’s gas prices, at more than $4 a gallon, are the highest ever, and the prospects of them significantly dropping any time soon are slight. The conditions for an exodus from suburbia to the cities would seem ideal once again.

Nevertheless, since 2003, when gas prices began their climb, suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of the central cities, with about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurring in suburban communities, according to the 2000 to 2006 census. And the most recent statistics from the annual American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of a significant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through 2007.

The entire article can be read here.

Kotkin is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive editor of the website http://www.newgeography.com/. Mark Schill, managing editor of the site, also has a recent post critiquing a Kansas City Star article that made the very argument Kotkin takes apart.

Sequesco joins a list of startup companies using synthetic biology to produce advanced biofuels, the Industry Standard said. “But unlike competitors SunEthanol and Amyris, which are engineering microbes to make cellulosic ethanol from various plant biomass sources, it uses waste carbon dioxide as its primary feedstock. The idea is to pump CO2 from large emitters like coal plants or biorefineries into the firm’s bioreactors, in which large colonies of bacteria would use the greenhouse gas and a nutrient broth to produce ethanol, biodiesel and other valuable byproducts. The protein-rich byproduct could be sold as animal feed or fertilizer, while the lipid-rich byproduct could be converted into bioplastics,” the Industry Standard said. “This is similar to what GreenFuel Technologies, a Cambridge, Mass.-based algal biodiesel maker, has been doing. It pipes in CO2 from power plants or industrial processes through large ponds filled with algae to make them grow and then harvests them. Sequesco’s business model can best be described as a hybrid between what GreenFuel and Amyris are doing. Sequesco’s bacteria grow 10 times faster than most algae raised for biodiesel, and because they are non-photosynthetic, they can be grown 24 hours a day, rain or shine. Area isn’t a constraint for the bugs (only volume is), so they can be cultured in conventional, low-cost bioreactors. Since space isn’t an issue, there’s great potential for scalability and the bioreactors can be installed almost anywhere.”

For the basics of synthetic biology, check out this New Atlantis article: “The Promise and Perils of Synthetic Biology.”