President George W. Bush delivered remarks at the White House on June 18 calling on Congress to help American families by removing barriers to domestic production of oil and gasoline. "For many Americans, there is no more pressing concern than the price of gasoline," Bush said. "Truckers and farmers and small business owners have been hit especially hard. Every American who drives to work, purchases food, or ships a product has felt the effect. And families across our country are looking to Washington for a response."

Bush asked congressional leaders to move forward with four steps to expand American oil and gasoline production:

• Increase access to the Outer Continental Shelf. Experts believe that areas under leasing prohibitions on the OCS could produce about 18 billion barrels of oil.
• Tap into the extraordinary potential of oil shale. In one major deposit – the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming – there lies the equivalent of about 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. If fully recovered, it would equal more than a century's worth of currently projected oil imports.
• Permit exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. With a drilling footprint of less than 2,000 acres – about 0.01 percent of this distant Alaskan terrain – America could produce an estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil. This is the equivalent of roughly two decades of imported crude oil from Saudi Arabia.
• Expand and enhance our refinery capacity. It has been 30 years since our nation has built a new refinery; we urgently need to upgrade our refining capacity. Refineries are the critical link between crude oil and the gasoline and diesel fuel that drivers put in their tanks. America now imports millions of barrels of fully-refined gasoline from abroad, imposing needless costs on American consumers and depriving American workers of good jobs.

Related Links:

President Bush's Remarks
Energy Fact Sheet
Energy for America's Future