Bush aides clarify statements about oil: Bush aides claim that Bush wants to decrease, not replace completely, U.S. consumption of foreign oil.

Miami Herald
Feb. 02, 2006

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic advisor said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.

The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that ''America is addicted to oil'' and his call to ``break this addiction.''

Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing ``more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.''

He pledged to ``move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.''

AN EXAMPLE

Not exactly, though, it turns out.

''This was purely an example,'' Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

Asked why the president used the words ''the Middle East'' when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that ''every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.'' The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

VOLATILE REGION

Presidential advisor Dan Bartlett made a similar point in a briefing before the speech. ''I think one of the biggest concerns the American people have is oil coming from the Middle East. It is a very volatile region,'' he said.

Through the first 11 months of 2005, the United States imported nearly 2.2 million barrels per day of oil from the Middle East nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. That's less than 20 percent of the total U.S. daily imports of 10.062 million barrels.

The Bush administration believes that plug-in hybrids with rechargeable batteries, hydrogen-powered cars and new ethanol products could reduce the total daily U.S. oil demand.