Another Oklahoma Oilman Offers a Surprising Green Energy Push

(MoneyWatch)  A major new national energy policy initiative has been launched in the U.S. heartland, and it has a decidedly greenish tint. Oddly enough, the new green energy push was hatched in Tulsa, Okla., once the self-styled "Oil Capital of the World."

The initiative, dubbed the National Energy Policy Institute, is the brainchild of a long-time Tulsa oilman: billionaire philanthropist George Kaiser, president and CEO of Tulsa-based Kaiser Francis Oil.

Kaiser launched NEPI in September 2008 and tapped former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles to head the group. With $8 million in seed funds, NEPI inked a three-year collaboration with Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank, to assess America's future energy policy options.

The new initiative comes on the heels of alternative energy campaigns by other high-profile Oklahoma oilmen: Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon's Clean Skies Foundation and T. Boone Pickens's push for wind energy and CNG vehicles. Last week, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa signed papers establishing NEPI's headquarters at the university. Kaiser ponied up another $1 million to support those new offices.

Despite its oily pedigree, NEPI will include the potential costs of climate change in its analysis as it also weighs the price tag of America's growing dependency on foreign oil. Kaiser minced no words regarding the latter, saying that the nation for far too long has been "beholden to medieval societies" and an "enabler of dictators hostile to U.S. interests." U.S. energy policy options should also focus on minimizing greenhouse emissions in a way that is "politically acceptable," he added.

In a lecture at TU sponsored by Chesapeake Energy, Knowles stressed the need to expose the hidden costs of current energy pricing. He noted that the status quo doesn't reflect the costs of "empowering nations hostile to our interests," the fact that fossil fuels are a limited resource, or the costs of global climate change.

An RFF-NEPI study assessing America's energy options in light of these hidden costs is due in the fall of this year, Knowles said. A second phase would focus on ranking the most cost-effective choices to determine "the actual cost of change in energy use and generation" to the nation. Then comes the hard part--the task of educating policymakers.

Knowles and Kaiser emphasized that a corollary goal would be to commercialize new, greener energy technologies drawn to the new initiative housed at TU, turning the one-time oil capital into a "21st Century energy center."