By Thomas M. Kostigen

Famous oilman T. Boone Pickens predicts brent crude oil will hit $148 per barrel this summer. Brent North Sea was trading at $125 per barrel at the time of his comments. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was trading at $103 per barrel.

Pickens spoke at the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (SALT) conference last week in Las Vegas.

"Oil is going to get tight," Pickens said. This he says despite Saudi Arabia's recent announcement that it could up capacity to between 12 million to 12.5 million barrels a day from the 10.3 million barrels it's producing now.

"I never trust the Saudis to tell the truth," Pickens said.

Oil, the old wildcatter said, has had its day; natural gas is the new, new thing.

"Horizontal drilling is just a giant stride for our country," Pickens said. Horizontal drilling is how natural gas is extracted from reserves.

The ensuing "fracking" that occurs, however, is controversial. Fracking derives from the process of hydraulic fracturing of source rocks that produce natural gas.

Just this week investors and organizations representing nearly $1 trillion in assets under management have coalesced to support "best practices" for the fracking of shale gas. To date, 55 institutional investors and other organizations that have been brought together by Boston Common Asset Management (Boston Common), the Investor Environmental Health Network (IEHN) and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) to push companies to improve fracking practices and risk disclosure.

Fracking can result in tainted underground water and, some claim, even earthquakes.

In an interview with Private Wealth, Pickens disputed the hazards of fracking, claiming to have "fracked" thousands of wells himself without incident. "The first fracking goes back to Texas in 1947," he said. "More than 800,000 wells have been fracked."

It's not, he says, a problem. And the areas such as upstate New York where fracking has become a hot environmental issue don't represent enough natural gas to warrant discussion. "Just stop doing it then," he said.

When asked whether he still believed water would be the next oil, he backs off that assessment, which he made several years back when he was petitioning for land rights in Texas.

For Pickens, it's all about natural gas and pushing through the Natural Gas Act, which would provide tax incentives worth as much as $5 billion to convert long-haul trucks from combustion engines to operate on natural gas.

As it stands, most 18-wheelers run on diesel, which is made from oil. Context for sure for Pickens' prediction of higher crude prices to come.