Clean Energy Founder T. Boone Pickens

Texas oilman and entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens founded Clean Energy (originally known as Pickens Fuel Corp.) with Andrew J. Littlefair in 1996 and is the largest shareholder.

Boone grew up in Holdenville, a small eastern Oklahoma town, where his father was in the oil business and his mother ran the Office of Price Administration during World War II, rationing gasoline and other goods for four counties. He graduated as a geologist from Oklahoma State University in 1951 and started work with Phillips Petroleum Co. in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. After three and a half years, he struck out on his own as an independent geologist.

He founded Mesa Petroleum Co. in 1956 with no oil and gas production and only $2,500 in
capital. From 1956 to 1996, the period that Boone was CEO, the company produced more than 3 trillion cubic feet of gas and 150 million barrels of oil. It was one of the largest independent oil and gas companies.

Upon leaving Mesa in 1996, Boone founded BP Capital. With more than $4 billion under management, BP Capital manages one of the nation’s most successful energy-oriented investment funds. Busier than ever today, Boone is also aggressively pursuing a wide range of other business interests, from water marketing and wind power and ranch development initiatives to Clean Energy.

Boone has championed the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel for more than two decades, citing the abundant supplies of the fuel domestically, and the fact that it is cleaner and more economical than foreign oil/gasoline. His advocacy of natural gas is in line with an increasingly conservationist bent best exemplified by land stewardship at his beloved Mesa Vista Ranch that sprawls across 68,000 acres in the Texas Panhandle.

Throughout his professional life, Boone also has been a generous philanthropist. He has given
hundreds of millions of dollars to a wide range of educational and healthcare institutions, cultural and heritage organizations, for disaster relief and medical research. “I’m convinced the Lord put me in this life to make money — and to be generous with it,” Boone has said.