By Elisabeth Bumiller and David E. Sanger
President Bush will renew a call for the development of alternative fuel for automobiles and promote the construction of new nuclear power plants in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, White House officials said Monday.
After years of partisan arguments over the administration’s efforts to open new parts of the country for oil and gas drilling, Mr. Bush will cast his discussion of nonoil sources of energy as an economic imperative for the United States and a national security necessity to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
The issues have been part of Mr. Bush’s agenda for years, but never a top priority. He will use his address to refocus attention on them at a time when oil is selling at more than $68 a barrel, close to its all-time high, and Americans are worried about the cost of fueling their cars and heating their homes.
White House officials said the address would contain no expensive policy initiatives at a time of growing deficits and when Congress would be focused on midterm elections. Mr. Bush will also use the address to announce new proposals in health care, fiscal policy and what White House officials are calling “American competitiveness,” which includes investing in math and science and job training.
White House officials said that Mr. Bush had practiced his speech Friday, Sunday and Monday morning in the White House theater, and that he was on the 23rd draft. They said that it was still being fact-checked, and that there would probably be last-minute changes to include developments on Iran and the Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last week.
Mr. Bush hinted at the energy proposals in his address in an interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS News and talked about hybrid cars that use conventional fuels and battery technology as well as the possibilities of other fuels.
“I agree with Americans who understand being hooked on foreign oil as an economic problem and a natural security problem,” Mr. Bush said.
He added that he wanted to advance the development of ethanol, the fuel that is made from corn, as well as the development of fuel made from the waste part of plant crops.
“I’m convinced we could do that with a good push, a technological push,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Schieffer.
The Energy Department has high hopes for such a fuel made from plant waste, like corn leaves and stalks, or from wood or grass, using the cellulose, or woody material, instead of sugars. The technique would reduce the amount of land needed for ethanol and the amount of fossil fuel, like natural gas and diesel fuel, used per gallon of ethanol production. But research is still in the early stages and years away from the marketplace.
Mr. Bush is unlikely to emphasize oil and gas exploration in his address.
“What’s interesting about this discussion is that he isn’t talking about oil exploration at home,” said one senior official with knowledge of the drafts of the speech. “Nobody wants to get bogged down in those arguments again,” he said, a reference to the debate in Washington over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and projects that involve federal lands in the West.
The proposals to promote alternative fuels and nuclear power are meant to build on the administration’s energy bill, passed by Congress last summer, which requires, for example, that 5 percent of the nation’s gasoline pool be ethanol by 2012.
“The president is stepping on the gas on these policies,” said Daniel Yergin, the author of “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power,” and the founder of a consulting firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates. “He’s increasing the focus, and that means increasing everything from research and development spending to regulatory reform.”
The president will also highlight recent initiatives that have removed some obstacles to building nuclear power plants in the United States. Mr. Bush has said for years that the nation has not ordered a new nuclear power plant since the 1970’s, the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
There has since been a shift in opinion in the industry and among some environmentalists toward nuclear power, which is now safer than in the 1970’s. The United States now gets 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, and this year electric companies are showing even more interest, partly because of the high price of natural gas, which a reactor could displace. But so far no company has ordered a new nuclear plant.
It is unclear what Mr. Bush will say, if anything, about reducing demand for fuel. In the past, he has not favored any big changes in the regulations that govern automobile fuel efficiency.
Mr. Bush is not prepared, officials say, to unveil a major project he hopes to announce in coming months involving the reprocessing of nuclear waste into new fuels, a project that the Japanese and Europeans have long been involved in but that has had mixed success at best.
Democrats in the House of Representatives, reacting in advance to Mr. Bush’s speech, said they would broadcast a commercial on the Fox News Channel that accuses the president and the Republican Party of favoring the oil, investment and pharmaceutical industries. The commercial shows lawmakers cheering Mr. Bush during earlier State of the Union addresses and asks, “What special interest will the Republican Congress rubber-stamp this time?”