Boone Pickens Sells His Water: Update

I guess Mr. Boone Pickens sees the writing on the wall for shale gas drilling?  Or maybe he just realized everybody knows he owns all that water and that's not necessarily good for one's legacy.

Still, he's going to make 103 million on this sale!!  Not bad. 

The preliminary $103 million deal between Pickens' Dallas-based Mesa Water LP and the Amarillo-based Canadian River Municipal Water Authority for the water rights to 211,000 acres in Roberts County in the Panhandle promised to end long-held concerns in the region that he would sell the water to downstate interests.

Link

UPDATE:  Here's a good explanation of the story behind this story from a Washington Examiner August 21, 2008 story. Not sure if our local papers ever reported it quite this way. Pretty sure they didn't.

Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is about to make a killing by selling water he doesn’t own. As he does it, it will be praised as a planet-friendly wind project. After he pulls it off, the media will deride it as craven capitalism. In truth, it is one the most audacious examples of politics for profit, showing how big government helps the biggest business steal from the rest of us. The plotline behind Pickens’ water-and-wind scheme is almost too rich to believe. If it were a movie script, reviewers would dismiss it as over-the-top.

Read more at the Washington Examiner