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Posted: 12:00 PM- WASHINGTON - President Bush on Wednesday called for tapping into oil shale in the West as a way to curb high gas prices.
Bush, in a Rose Garden speech, joined a growing number of Republicans advocating for expanded production of oil shale - a sedimentary rock that when heated yields a fuel source that can be processed into a synthetic oil. The president stressed a much-used talking point that the oil shale deposits in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming hold the equivalent of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
"That's more than three times larger than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia," Bush said. "And it can be fully recovered - and if it can be fully recovered it would be equal to more than a century's worth of currently projected oil imports."
The cost of extracting the oil from the rock so far has been too high, but it's currently less than the market price of oil now, Bush said, and that makes it a "highly promising resource."
Bush mentioned oil shale as part of a four-prong strategy to wean the nation off foreign sources of oil, which has risen sharply in recent years to an all-time high. Bush also spoke in favor of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in coastal areas along American soil and also to expedite the building of more oil refineries.
Rep. Chris Cannon, a Utah Republican who last week introduced legislation to cut through any red tape on oil shale production, hailed Bush's comments.
"I welcome the president's leadership on this issue and am pleased he has heard the cries of the American people to develop energy here at home," Cannon said in a statement.
"For too long we have been on bended knee to foreign potentates, while this country's vast energy sources go undeveloped."
No company has yet to produce a commercially viable fuel source from oil shale despite years - some would say decades - of attempts, though some companies have touted their successful efforts in Canada to harvest oil from tar sands as an indication oil shale is a feasible alternative to crude oil.
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