Bush's plan to wean US off imported oil: Ambitious enough?

After bluntly stating that "America is addicted to oil," President Bush delivered one of his largest applause lines during his State of the Union speech: a new national goal to slash imports from the Middle East.

With Americans concerned about rising gasoline prices and dependence on imported oil, the president wants to cut 75 percent of US oil imports from the region by 2025 - and he provided a new energy plan to help do it.

Parts of Mr. Bush's "Advanced Energy Initiative" - including a fresh focus on cellulosic ethanol research and attention to battery technology and plug-in hybrid cars - won plaudits from some energy experts. Others called the plan "misleading" for lumping proposals for electricity generation with initiatives to save oil.

But the plan for a 22 percent boost in federal energy research also left many experts scratching their heads. How would solar, wind, "clean, safe nuclear," and "clean coal" research cut US oil imports?

"The president's initiative ties an oil savings target to a basket of energy solutions for homes and businesses, which have nothing to do with our oil problem," Gal Luft of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, an energy security think tank in Washington, said in an e-mail.

Since the 1970s oil crises, he wrote, utilities have cut back so much on oil use that today they use a minuscule amount of oil to generate electricity. And while US coal reserves are abundant, and coal-gasification technology could lead to reduced carbon-dioxide pollution, the impact on oil imports would be virtually nil, Mr. Luft added.

To others, that goal is the right direction, but far less ambitious overall in terms of cutting oil dependence than is legislation currently pending in Congress.

With US oil imports from the Persian Gulf expected to rise to about 5 million barrels a day by 2025, the bottom line is that the president is proposing that the country cut its imports from the region by 3.75 million barrels. A bipartisan proposal in Congress - the "Vehicle and Fuel Choices for American Security Act" - advocates a 7-million-barrel cut over 20 years, nearly double Bush's proposal and eliminating the need for any Middle Eastern oil.

"There is no reason for the president to be more timid than Congress," Anne Korin, chairman of the Set America Free Coalition, said in a statement.

While she and others saw some promise in the president's new focus on developing cellulosic ethanol and developing hybrid and plug-in hybrid technology, others challenged him to act quickly with tools now at hand to reduce oil consumption.

After the first oil crisis of the 1970s, improved efficiency and tough fuel-economy measures for cars had by 1985 slashed oil imports from 46 percent to 27 percent of total consumption.

By contrast, the US burned about 20.6 million barrels a day last year, and imports were 65 percent of the total. About 2.3 million barrels a day of US imports (a 17 percent share) came from the Persian Gulf last year, or about 11 percent of total US consumption.

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