WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Wednesday defended his energy policies amid criticism from Republicans by highlighting projects designed to increase U.S. supplies, including a pipeline that is part of TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL.
Speaking in front of a field of solar panels at the Copper Mountain Solar 1 Facility near Boulder City, Nev., Obama said the U.S. must stay ahead of countries such as China and India in the development of alternative energy sources while increasing production of fossil fuels.
“As long as I’m president, we will not walk away from the promise of clean energy,” he said.
After stops in Nevada and New Mexico on Wednesday, Obama today will use the backdrop of an oil-storage hub in Cushing, Okla., to announce that the administration is making TransCanada’s pipeline from there to refineries on the Texas coast an infrastructure priority, according to an administration official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. That will qualify the project for accelerated review of permit applications under a previous executive order.
Republicans dismissed the move on the pipeline as political window dressing on a project that’s already well under way to deflect criticism Obama has received for refusing to approve the northern segment of TransCanada’s pipeline, which would carry crude from Canada’s oil sands.
“This is like a governor personally issuing a fishing license,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. “This portion of the pipeline is being built in spite of the president,not because of him.”
While Obama focused on natural gas, solar and alternative-energy research on his two-day trip, the cost of oil is a political flash point as he seeks re-election in November.
The average retail price of regular gasoline in the U.S. was $3.84 a gallon as of Tuesday, up about 17 percent since the start of the year, according to AAA’s daily fuel price survey.
While the president may have little control over the price of a gallon of gasoline, the public looks to him to ease strains, said Andrew Baumann, a vice president of the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
“Voters definitely believe that the president can have an impact on gas prices,” Baumann said. “Voters are not going to accept the argument that there’s not much he can do about it.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters traveling with the president that the administration is committed to increasing domestic energy production “in a safe and responsible way.”
After leaving Nevada, Obama was heading to oil and gas production fields outside Maljamar, N.M. Obama has repeatedly said domestic oil and gas production has increased each year he’s been in office, with oil production at an eight-year high and domestic natural-gas production at an all-time high.
In Oklahoma today, he will speak at the site where construction is to begin in June on the pipeline to Texas refineries. He finishes the trip in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research.
Information for this article was contributed from New York by Jim Efstathiou Jr. and from Washington by Roger Runningen of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 03/22/2012