On Wednesday, amid all the hullabaloo over the budget battles, a simple, discrete and largely overlooked bill was dropped into the Congressional hopper. Sponsored by two Democrats and two Republicans — that’s right: an actual bipartisan piece of legislation — its official title is the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act, or the Nat Gas Act, for short. People in the know, however, call it the Boone Pickens bill.

Boone Pickens and I go way back; he was the subject of my first-ever business story, for Texas Monthly, nearly 30 years ago. Though we’ve had our ups and downs since then, and though our politics are very different, I like and respect him. In recent years, we’ve become friends.

Which is to say: I’ve got a bias here. Then again, so does Boone. Although he is usually described as a Texas oilman, that’s a bit of a misnomer. Boone has spent most of his career drilling not for oil but for natural gas, which he knows more about than just about anyone. His late-life occupation has been running a natural gas-oriented hedge fund, which has made him, at the age of 82, a billionaire several times over.

Out of that deep knowledge has come a powerful belief: that the country’s energy salvation depends on moving away from the fuel we don’t have — namely, oil, where imports, some of which come “from our enemies” (to quote Boone), account for two-thirds of our oil needs. Instead, we should move to a fuel we have in abundance: natural gas. Most experts say there is enough natural gas in the ground to last a century; Boone’s convinced that modern drilling techniques will allow us to find enough for several centuries.