Administration’s Public Meetings Fuel Heated Debate Over National Energy Policy : Resources: Forums held across the country have been filled with competing interests. The first draft of the White House’s plan is due today.

On a damp, slate-gray day here last winter, the Bush Administration saw just how hard it would be to forge a national energy policy--a process that reaches a milestone today.

In a drafty, oversized meeting room deep in the riverfront Cobo Hall, officials from the departments of Energy and Transportation heard a parade of speakers deliver blunt, often diametrically opposing views on how to prepare the country for the coming energy crunch.

Some urged Washington to abandon automobile fuel-efficiency standards. “A badly flawed law,” fumed General Motors Corp. President Robert C. Stempel. Environmentalists argued for stricter requirements.

Alternative fuels? Methanol is the way to go, several said. Impractical and potentially dangerous, others warned.

And so it went, until the mid-December sun had cast long shadows across the Motor City and the bureaucrats flew home to Washington, one more in a series of public hearings behind them.

The 15 hearings around the nation have resulted in the first draft of a White House-ordered “national energy strategy,” which will be unveiled this morning in Washington by Energy Secretary James D. Watkins.

The 230-page interim report is a compilation of testimony given by some 1,400 people and interest groups. It summarizes virtually every imaginable goal that might set the nation on a course toward energy independence. The goals are followed by assorted “obstacles” and possible solutions.

“We’ve created the universe that we need to look at from here on out,” said project director Linda G. Stuntz, the Energy Department’s deputy undersecretary for policy, planning and analysis.

“At least now we’ve got our arms around the problems, the issues,” she added in an interview last week. During the next eight months, “we’ll have to get from this completely open-ended document to one that narrows the options to reasonable ranges.”

The final document, to be delivered to President Bush in December, is to serve as something of a menu of tough choices in the years ahead.

The makings of the “national energy strategy” go back to a White House ceremony last July, when Bush directed Watkins to develop a long-term plan to ensure that the nation will have adequate supplies of clean, competitively priced energy well beyond the year 2000.

Since then, Watkins has convened public hearings from Providence, R.I., to Honolulu, listening to private citizens, industry and consumer groups. For Stuntz, an overriding impression gained from the hearings, none of which was held in California, was the sharp differences in regional perspectives.

“Some parts of the country will look at solutions that other sections will not look at,” she said.

“We heard a lot about oil imports in the oil-producing states. But we didn’t hear anything about that in the Northwest. We heard a lot about clean-coal technology in the Midwest, and even in New York; we didn’t hear about that in the Northwest.”

The need to reconcile competing priorities could not have been clearer than during the daylong hearing here last December.

While some strongly advocated methanol as the leading alternative fuel to gasoline, James J. MacKenzie of World Resources Institute called that idea “a serious mistake” because the fuel is not inherently clean.

Helen O. Petrauskas, a Ford Motor Co. vice president, didn’t favor any particular alternative fuel but urged Washington to target one “as the winner” so the industry could plan accordingly.

But Ray A. Lewis of Worldwide Methyl Fuels urged the panel to “let us compete to see who survives.”

C. Ronald Tilley, chairman of the Columbia Gas System Inc., said that since natural gas burns clean and is available domestically, it should play “a prominent role in national energy and transportation policy.”

MacKenzie advocated the development of hydrogen-based fuels.

Others spoke on behalf of electric cars, saying they would be ideal for urbanites, who typically drive less than 60 miles a day.

But the very next speaker threw cold water on the idea.

Any energy savings from electric cars might simply be offset by coal-fired emissions that will be generated to make all the batteries for electric cars, said David E. Cole, director of the University of Michigan’s office for the study of automotive transportation.

Rep. Bill Schuette (R-Mich.) reminded the panel that new safety or emissions requirements--heavy favorites in California--are likely to add weight to cars and thus adversely affect fuel economy.

Given the diversity of opinion, the final results are likely to be divisive. As Stuntz concluded: “There aren’t going to be answers for everybody.”