Natural gas proponent T. Boone Pickens will bring the message to Indiana University in a speech Sept. 18 that also will be broadcast on the Web.

Pickens, organizer of his self-titled Pickens Plan, has embarked on a self-funded grassroots campaign aimed at reducing the nation’s dependence on imported oil.

“America is blessed with the world’s greatest wind power corridor and enormous reserves of clean natural gas,” he writes on his Web site. "The Pickens Plan utilizes these tremendous resources to build a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives and buying time for us to develop even greater new technologies and distribution systems.

The Plan calls for building new wind generation facilities that will produce 20 percent of the nation’s electricity while using abundant domestic natural gas supply as a transportation fuel as well as for power generation.

The combination of these domestic energies can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. And do it all in 10 years.

Pickens’ lecture “America’s Foreign Oil Dependency Crisis,” will begin at 10 a.m. at http://www.broadcast.iu.edu.

IU’s Kelley School of Business is hosting his speech before students, faculty and guests on the IU Bloomington campus at the IU Auditorium, 1211 E. Seventh St.

But a free viewing will also be held at IUPUI’s University Place Conference Center’s auditorium, 850 W. Michigan St., Indianapolis. Pre-registration is requested and can be done onsite starting at 9 a.m. Contact Dave Hosick, coordinator of communications and media relations with the Kelley School of Business at IUPUI, at dhosick@iupui.edu or 317-274-6856.