Obama Lays Out Plan to Cut Reliance on Fuel Imports

President Obama called on Wednesday for a one-third reduction in oil imports over the next decade, and said the effort had to begin immediately. In a speech at Georgetown University , the president said that the United States cannot go on consuming one- quarter of the world’s oil production while posessing only two percent of global reserves. He said that the country had to begin a long-term plan to reduce its reliance on imported oil, and that the decades-long political bickering that has stalled progress toward that goal had to end.

With oil supplies from the Middle East now pinched by political upheaval with calls growing in Congress for expanded domestic oil and gas production, the president referred in his speech a similar runup in energy prices in 2008.

“Now here’s the thing — we’ve been down this road before,” Mr. Obama said. “Remember, it was just three years ago that gas prices topped $4 a gallon. I remember because I was in the middle of a presidential campaign.”

He continued: “Because it was also the height of political season, so you had a lot of slogans and gimmicks and outraged politicians, they were waving their three-point-plans for two-dollar-a-gallon gas. You remember that: ‘Drill, baby, drill’ and all of that. And none of it would really do anything to solve the problem.”

Saying there were no quick fixes to the nation’s oil addiction, Mr. Obama went on to propose a mix of measures, none of them new, to wean the nation off the barrel.

He called for a fuel-saving strategy of producing more electric cars, converting trucks to run on natural gas, building new refineries to brew billions of gallons of biofuels and setting new fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles. Congress has been debating similar measures for years.

“The only way for America’s energy supply to be truly secure is by permanently reducing our dependence on oil,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re going to have to find ways to boost our efficiency so that we use less oil. We’ve got to discover and produce cleaner, renewable sources of energy that also produce less carbon pollution that is threatening our climate. And we have to do it quickly.”

He pointed out that the nationn has had a tendency, ever since the first Arab oil embargo in 1973, to panic when gasoline prices rise and then fall back into old fuel-guzzling habits when prices recede.

“We cannot keep going from shock when gas prices go up to trance when gas prices go back down,” he said. “We can’t rush to propose action when prices are high then push the snooze button when they go down again. We can’t keep doing that. The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity and security on a resource that will eventually run out.”

More than half of the oil burned in the United States today comes from overseas or from Mexico or Canada.

The president repeated his assertion that, despite the frightening situation at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex in Japan, nuclear power will remain an important source of electricity in the United States for decades to come.

“It’s important to recognize that nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he said, noting that nuclear power now provides about one-fifth of domestic electricity supplies. “Those of us concerned about climate change know that nuclear power, if it’s safe, can make a significant contribution to the climate change question. And I’m determined to ensure that it’s safe.” He said he had directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to undertake a comprehensive safety review of the 104 reactors now operating in the United States.

He also responded to members of Congress and oil industry executives who have claimed that the administration has choked off domestic oil and gas production by imposing costly new regulations and by blocking exploration on millions of acres of potentially oil-rich tracts on shore and off.

He noted that the administration had put in place new safeguards after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last April, and had begun to reissue drilling permits that had been stalled while the industry demonstrated that it could safely resume operations. And he noted that the energy industry already had leases covering vast areas that it was not using.

“So any claim that my administration is responsible for gas prices because we’ve shut down oil production — any claim like that is simply untrue,” the president said. “It might make for a useful political sound bite — but it doesn’t track with reality.

The administration is not prepared to open new public lands and waters to drilling, officials said, but will use a new set of incentives and penalties to prod industry to develop resources on the lands they already have access to.

The Interior Department on Tuesday issued a paper saying that more than two-thirds of offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico and more than half of onshore leases on federal lands are unused. Oil industry officials called the paper a smokescreen to cover the administration’s stingy approach to drilling permits.

“This is an effort to distract the American people from rising gas prices and the fact that the administration has been delaying, deferring or denying access to our oil and natural gas resources here at home,” said Erik Milito, the director of exploration policy at the American Petroleum Institute. “Lease sales have been delayed or canceled, and this year, for the first time since 1957, we may not have a single offshore lease sale.”

White House officials indicated that Mr. Obama was turning to energy issues after a period of intense focus on turmoil in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East. At the outset of his remarks Wednesday, he linked the issues, noting that the unrest had reduced global oil supplies and driven up domestic fuel prices. The reduction in oil imports he has set as a target — between three million and four million barrels a day over 10 years — corresponds roughly to the amount of oil the United States now imports from the Middle East and Africa.

Presidents since Richard M. Nixon have made this point, and American oil imports have continued to rise, except when slowed by recession.

Republicans in Congress have grown increasingly vocal about the administration’s energy and environment policies, saying they discourage domestic oil and gas development and impose heavy costs on industry in a period of economic angst. On Tuesday, House Republicans introduced three bills to reverse the administration’s offshore oil drilling policies, calling for vast new tracts of offshore territory to be opened to deep-water drilling and for speedier approval of drilling permits.

On the Senate floor, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, denounced the president for a variety of alleged energy sins, including telling Brazilian officials last week that the United States would be an eager consumer for its offshore oil.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Mr. McConnell said.

“Here we’ve got the administration looking for just about any excuse it can find to lock up our own energy sources here at home,” he said, “even as it’s applauding another country’s efforts to grow its own economy and create jobs by tapping into its own energy sources.”

The administration imposed a moratorium on most deep-water drilling activities in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 rig workers and released nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department wrote new safety and environmental rules for offshore drilling and officially lifted the moratorium in October.

The department has now issued seven permits for activities that were halted under the suspension, with 12 other deep-water permits pending. An additional 24 permit applications have been returned to applicants for more information.

Mr. Obama also renewed his call from the State of the Union address to increase the percentage of electricity produced from so-called clean sources to 80 percent from the current 40 percent by 2035. The president’s definition of clean energy includes renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal energy and hydroelectric generation; it also includes nuclear power, natural gas and coal with carbon capture, and storage, an as-yet-unproved technology.

He said his clean-energy proposal would give companies incentives to invest in new technology and would help the United States compete in global markets for low-carbon energy sources. The United States currently trails China and Germany in investment in clean-energy technology. His budget for the next fiscal year calls for $8 billion in research and development spending on new energy sources.

On Friday, the president will appear at a United Parcel Service depot in Landover, Md., to talk about ways to make commercial truck and bus fleets more fuel-efficient and to make greater use of domestically produced natural gas in transportation.