President Obama to call for one-third cut to oil imports

Washington Post
By Steven Mufson, Wednesday, March 30, 6:00 AM

President Obama on Wednesday will call for a one-third cut in oil imports by 2020, part of a plan he says will reduce U.S. dependence on foreign petroleum.



With rising gasoline prices at home and political turmoil throughout the Middle East, Obama will seek in a speech at Georgetown University to rally Americans — and bickering lawmakers — behind a program that draws about half of that import cut from energy savings and about half from greater energy production, according to Obama aides who briefed reporters Tuesday.



Many facets of his program will be familiar. The president will propose wider use of natural gas, including incentives to use it to fuel fleet vehicles such as city buses. He will back greater production of biofuels and will vow to establish at least four commercial-scale refineries producing cellulosic ethanol or advanced biofuels within the next two years. He also will pledge to establish higher fuel-efficiency standards for heavy trucks, just as he did for passenger vehicles early in his administration.



Obama will also urge oil companies to make greater use of the federal leases both onshore and offshore to prop up domestic oil output. The oil industry and GOP lawmakers have been loudly complaining about delays in the permitting of offshore drilling in recent months. But an irked administration, which had pledged tougher scrutiny of drilling applications after last year’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, fired back Tuesday with an Interior Department report that revived earlier debates about whether oil companies were exploiting the leases they already have.



Obama has made energy a priority since taking office, with the increase in automobile fuel efficiency marking perhaps his greatest impact. As part of the economic stimulus package adopted in 2009, he also won about $70 billion in grants and loan guarantees to promote energy efficiency, advanced batteries for cars and renewable energy. He has said that in addition to energy benefits those monies will create what he calls “green jobs.” But he poured a large amount of effort into winning passage of a cap-and-trade climate bill, which failed.



Obama faces a plethora of obstacles in the push for less reliance on foreign oil. One is the appetite of the U.S. economy. The federal Energy Information Administration forecasts that the United States will import a net of 9.7 million barrels a day of crude oil and refined petroleum products in 2011 and 10 million barrels a day in 2012. Net imports accounted for 49 percent of all U.S. liquid fuel consumption in 2010, down from 57 percent in 2009 primarily because of the drop in consumption during the recession.



Yet members of Congress are divided about the best ways to cut imports, with lawmakers often uniting across party lines depending on what region they represent. An expansion of offshore drilling, for example, garners substantial support among gulf coast lawmakers, but opposition from representatives from states such as California, Florida and New Jersey.



With Obama’s push for more electric cars, there is also disagreement about the best way to make sure electric utilities can meet demands. With Japan’s nuclear crisis still in progress, it is a sensitive time to promote nuclear energy.



But Obama can expect support from people across party lines worried about the national security implications of relying on oil imports. On Wednesday the Bipartisan Policy Center — featuring former senators Trent Lott and Byron Dorgan and former Obama national security adviser Jim Jones — is releasing a report saying “recent events — from unprecedented unrest in the Middle East and North Africa to the Japanese nuclear crisis to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill — demand a thorough reassessment of America’s energy security.”



In addition to political obstacles, Obama faces technical ones. Legislation signed by President George W. Bush in 2007 called on oil refiners to use minimum amounts of biofuels, including 16 billion gallons a year of cellulosic ethanol by 2022. Though substantial amounts of venture capital — and government subsidies — have gone into pilot plants, commercial viability has remained elusive.



Finally, even if the United States becomes more efficient and uses less energy for every unit of economic output, a growing economy is one hungry for energy.



Virtually every president since President Richard M. Nixon has called upon Americans to conserve energy and seek alternatives to oil imports in the name of independence from international turmoil or pressure.



In 1973, Nixon called for a “Project Independence,” an effort he said should summon the spirit of the Apollo space missions or Manhattan Project and achieve self-sufficiency by 1980. Instead, the United States was importing more oil by that time.



In January 1975, President Gerald R. Ford said that “Americans are no longer in full control of their own destiny, when that destiny depends on uncertain foreign fuel at high prices fixed by others.”



In 1977, President Jimmy Carter called the energy challenge “the moral equivalent of war” and proposed conservation, alternative energy, higher gasoline taxes, ethanol fuels and wider use of nuclear power. He too set a goal of reducing oil imports by a third, to 6 million barrels a day by 1985 from 9 million a day in 1977.



That target was surpassed by 1982, thanks to a rise in Alaskan oil production and the virtual end of the use of oil by electric utilities and manufacturers. But soon imports resumed their relentless climb as a share of U.S. oil needs. By 2006, Bush was calling on Americans to end their “addiction” to oil , warning of “danger and decline” if the country continued to rely on “unstable” countries. He urged a 75 percent reduction in U.S. oil imports by 2025.



“We’ve been having this conversation for nearly four decades now,” Obama said in a March 11 news conference. “Every few years, gas prices go up; politicians pull out the same old political playbook, and then nothing changes. And when prices go back down, we slip back into a trance. And then when prices go up, suddenly we’re shocked. I think the American people are tired of that.”