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Dallas oilman Boone Pickens is betting on natural gas again, this time by investing in refueling stations. The former chairman of Mesa Inc. has formed a company, Pickens Fuel Corp., to buy about 30 stations from Pacific Enterprises' Southern California Gas Co. unit. Terms of the possible transaction were not disclosed. Pacific Enterprises must sell 39 stations in all and is in talks with several unidentified buyers, a spokeswoman said, adding that a sale could be announced in February.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign for a $243-million telephone users tax has received a major contribution from an unlikely source -- a Texas oilman whose company could see a windfall from one of the mayor's environmental initiatives. Proposition S, which is on Tuesday's ballot, took in a $150,000 contribution last week from billionaire T. Boone Pickens, the co-founder of Clean Energy, which bills itself as the nation's largest supplier of liquid natural gas.

Billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens has sold all his holdings in Yahoo Inc. in a pique over the way the Internet company's management handled sales talks with Microsoft Corp. Pickens told the San Francisco Chronicle that he sold all 10 million of his Yahoo shares, at a loss, because he grew frustrated with the company's repeated rebuffs of Microsoft's advances. "I think that Yahoo management was pathetic," Pickens told the Chronicle in a story published Tuesday.

Perhaps you've seen oilman T. Boone Pickens on television advertising the "Pickens Plan" for alternative energy, urging Americans to wean themselves from foreign fuel by adopting natural gas and wind power. Pickens has another plan he isn't advertising and from which he also stands to profit. He wants Californians to borrow $5 billion to invest in natural gas and alternative energy by voting yes on Proposition 10 on the November ballot.

When billionaire oilman and investor T. Boone Pickens launched his plan this summer to boost the use of wind and natural gas to ease U.S. dependence on foreign oil, gasoline prices were at a record $4.11 a gallon and oil prices were at $147 a barrel. Now oil prices are at a 20-month low, falling to $59.33 a barrel on Tuesday, and gasoline prices have plummeted to below $2 a gallon in many parts of the country.

T. Boone Pickens Jr. roiled Los Angeles decades ago with an attempted hostile takeover of Unocal Corp., best known for its orange-ball 76 service stations. But these days, the Texas oilman is drawn to a different kind of drama. His investment firm, BP Capital Inc., wages battle in the commodities markets, where the wildly volatile prices of crude oil and natural gas can turn big losses into gains in an instant, and vice versa. After roller-coaster results with his Mesa Petroleum Co.

Renewing a debate that raged through much of the 2004 presidential race, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Friday accepted Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens' offer to pay $1 million to anyone who can disprove allegations by veterans who disparaged Kerry's Vietnam War record.