?Ever since geologist and natural gas advocate Robert A. Hefner III “saw a world in a drop of pond water” at age 15, he has been fascinated by science, energy and the big picture. His heroes include Darwin and Einstein. He has traveled the world to meet with energy experts from Singapore and China to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has testified in Washington. Along the way, he developed a world-class Chinese art collection.


Hefner is a third-generation independent oilman who prefers natural gas. Armed with a geology degree from the University of Oklahoma, he worked in Phillips Petroleum’s economic analysis department in the 1950s. In 1959, he started his own outfit, The GHK Co., with two partners. It still drills today, focusing on deep- and shallow-gas plays, mostly in Oklahoma. He says today’s gas price is below replacement cost.


It’s an old problem. Gas prices were regulated and very low in the 1950s and 1960s, and gas was considered a nuisance. But not to Hefner, who believed early on that there are vast untapped resources of gas worldwide, and that gas would become the fuel of choice.


Hefner pioneered expensive, technically challenging and ultradeep wildcats in Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin in the 1960s and 1970s. “We drilled many deep, world-record wildcats while always struggling to make payroll,” he says. One, the #1 Green, drilled in 1969, was at that time the second-deepest, and the highest-pressured, well in the world. It has since produced about 21 billion cubic feet, but when it was completed, gas sold for only 17 cents, so it was an economic failure.


Today, Hefner believes 21st century energy technologies will be the world’s biggest business and are something young people should pursue. And, he believes gas should be the major energy source for some time to come.


To that end he has just written The GET: The Grand Energy Transition. The book’s roll-out in Washington was planned for shortly after this interview.


Investor You’ve fought for gas-price deregulation and market share for 50 years. Why write this book now?
Hefner I wanted to share my life’s work about America’s abundance of gas and its importance in our energy future, because I don’t want to see America make the same mistakes we made in the 1970s. Then, all the big oil companies testified we were running out of gas. They were supported by the coal industry, and our government accepted the idea for years. Carter-era legislation actually prohibited using gas for power generation. Those 30- or 50-year mistakes put an extra 15 billion tons of CO2 emissions into our atmosphere.


Investor What is your thinking behind GET?
Hefner GET is short for Grand Energy Transition. It’s the evolutionary transition from unsustainable, high-carbon solids and liquids to sustainable energy gases: natural gas, wind, solar and hydrogen. We have been decarbonizing our world for 100 years, moving from wood to coal to oil, and now natural gas—and away from high-carbon, complex molecules. The simpler the molecule, the cleaner the fuel: it’s more efficient and better environmentally. Gas is a big step forward, with only one atom of dirty carbon and four atoms of clean hydrogen.
When we moved back to coal in the 1970s, we slowed that process and other countries followed our lead. Increased carbon use since the mid-1970s correlates to increases in world surface temperatures.


Investor How much natural gas does America have?
Hefner In the early 1990s, I predicted 3,000 trillion cubic feet. That’s probably equal to Russia’s gas supplies, but for some reason, we believe in Russia’s gas potential, not our own.


Investor You had this huge number before the advent of shale gas?
Hefner I did. Even in 1978, I thought it was 1,500 or 2,000 trillion.


Investor What direction should the U.S. take?
Hefner Many say use every fuel source, but I’m against that because we’d diffuse our talents and money and slow our environmental progress. The GET shows us the way forward. Solid fuels like coal are the past. Liquids like oil are on their way out.


Investor No biofuels?
Hefner No. They are an attempt to stay linked to our liquid past. What we should do is simply change the tanks in our cars to hold natural gas instead. Civilization can’t be sustained using biofuels for transportation. The origin of both oil and coal is a narrow window of temperature and pressure, but methane gas is created everywhere.


Investor What would you tell President Obama?
Hefner The fastest way to make enormous leaps forward is to make full use of our 2.2-million-mile gas grid that connects to 63 million homes, where about 130 million cars reside, or half the U.S. fleet. Let’s retrofit them to natural gas. That will create thousands of new jobs, spark billions of capital expenditures and keep millions at work in the automobile industry.
We should retool like we did during World War II so that over the next five years, we could eliminate half of our oil imports...and eliminate trillions of dollars paid to foreign oil producers.
We won’t diminish our use of coal and oil until consumers start paying the real price.