WASHINGTON, Oct 4: President George W. Bush on Friday expressed frustration at Congress’ delay in acting on a broad energy bill, saying the legislation must be passed to help the US economy and national security.

Senate and House of Representatives negotiators have been working on a combined version of energy legislation passed by both chambers earlier this year. Republican leaders this week postponed until mid-October a planned vote by the negotiators on a draft bill, which includes oil drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge.

For the sake of national security and for the sake of economic security, they need to get a (energy) bill to my desk soon, Bush said at a campaign fundraiser in Milwaukee.

Congressional negotiators say at issue are disputes over subsidies to build an Alaskan natural gas pipeline, upgrading the US electric grid, and increasing the use of ethanol-blended gasoline while providing lawsuit relief to producers of the competing MTBE gasoline additive.

A massive power blackout in August that left 50 million Americans and Canadians in the dark should have been enough to push Congress to pass energy legislation, according to Bush.

It should be a wake-up call to the Congress that we need to modernize our ability to move electricity around America, he said. We need to encourage more investment into modernizing the grid.

Bush called for increasing energy conservation efforts and developing new types of energy, but he also pushed for drilling for more traditional oil and natural gas.

The administration wants to use new technology to tap the potential 16 billion barrels of crude in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and help cut back on US oil imports.

We need to use the old sources of energy in an environmentally friendly way to make sure we’re less dependent on foreign sources of crude, Bush said.

Senate Democrats have warned Republicans to take the ANWR drilling language out of the energy bill or they will kill the legislation with a filibuster.

While Bush backs opening ANWR, the administration is opposed to federal subsidies in the energy bill that would guarantee the companies operating a proposed Alaskan pipeline a minimum price for the natural gas that would be shipped.

Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle sent a letter on Friday to his Senate colleagues urging them to back a 52-cent tax credit per thousand cubic feet of gas for the pipeline’s owners if the price of natural gas fell sharply.

The pipeline, which has a $20 billion price tag and would take 10 years to build, could ship 4.5 billion cubic feet of gas a day from Alaska to the lower 48 states.—Reuters