June 2 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire hedge-fund manager Boone Pickens said today that a CFTC probe of crude trading as oil rallied to a record $135.09 a barrel is a ``waste of time.''

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said May 29 that it was investigating how much of the rise in oil prices were caused by speculators who manipulated the market instead of consumer demand.

``There's nothing to it to start with,'' Pickens said in interviews at an American Wind Energy Association conference in Houston. ``That's not what happened. You have 85 million barrels a day of oil available in the global energy market and 86.4 million barrels a day of demand. So the price of oil is going to go up until you can kill demand.''

Pickens reiterated a forecast, first made in April, that oil will reach $150 a barrel this year. Crude oil for July delivery fell 16 cents to $127.60 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 7:07 p.m. Oil has risen 96 percent in the past year. It touched the record $135.09 a barrel on May 22.

Pickens said the U.S. should utilize its supply of natural gas for transportation. ``You're going to have to get natural gas in competition with gasoline and diesel,'' he said. ``That's the only way out for us in this country.''

Mesa Power

He also said wind has a larger role to play. His Mesa Power LLP said last month that it ordered 667 wind turbines from General Electric Co. to begin a $10 billion wind-farm project in Texas that will be the nation's largest. When completed in 2014, the Pampa Wind Project in northern Texas will be capable of producing about 4,000 megawatts. That's enough power for about 1.2 million average U.S. homes.

The U.S. Department of Energy said in May that wind could account for 20 percent of the nation's power supplies by 2030, delaying new coal-fueled power plants and lowering emissions of greenhouse gases. Wind may provide more than 1 percent of U.S. power this year.

FPL Group Inc., the largest U.S. producer of wind power, said today that the country won't reach the 20 percent level by 2030. Pickens said ``20 percent of our power could be generated by wind in less than 20 years.'' He also said Congress needs ``to fix the transmission because it's too important to this country.''

To contact the reporters on this story: Edward Klump in Houston at eklump@bloomberg.net; Margot Habiby in Dallas at mhabiby@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 2, 2008 20:25 EDT