Conservation Urged to Ease Oil Shortage : Energy: The Administration unveils a plan to boost U.S. production.

The Bush Administration unveiled a revised program today to ease the shortfall in oil, but Energy Secretary James Watkins said worldwide shortages could linger at near 1 million barrels a day through the winter.

Watkins said he believed that the shortfall can be “managed” through conservation efforts and additional domestic production.

He left open the possibility of drawing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the coming months if conservation and increased production efforts fall short of expectations. But he reiterated that it was too soon to use the reserve, which holds nearly 600 million barrels.

“That’s a cherished reserve that has a finite life . . . and we don’t want to use it too early,” Watkins told the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee. He said he was “comfortable” that the department would be ready to take oil from the reserve on short notice if needed.

The department outlined a revised combined program of energy conservation and oil production measures that officials said is aimed at cutting the oil supply shortfall in the United States by about 1.1 million barrels a day.

The new program, including a radio advertising campaign urging conservation, came amid increasing criticism that the Administration’s efforts to ease the country’s reliance on foreign oil have been more rhetoric than substance.

“The President should give more than a speech. He should give us a program,” Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) said Wednesday in response to Bush’s call for increased energy conservation in light of the Persian Gulf crisis.

Watkins rejected such criticism, saying the Administration’s efforts to increase production and get Americans to conserve oil are “substantive. . . . We do not think they are trivial.”

Much of the department’s program announced today mirrored the response plan announced shortly after the Mideast crisis developed, including calls on motorists to conserve fuel by properly inflating tires and various measures to expand production from existing domestic oil fields.

But Watkins said as much as 165,000 barrels per day also could be saved by fuel switching and urged that regulatory and other barriers be eased to promote switching. He said there are 37 natural gas pipeline proposals awaiting federal or state approval.