Senators Try to Pass Slimmer Energy Bill

WASHINGTON — - WASHINGTON — Trying to revive stalled energy legislation, Senate Republicans recently proposed cutting the price of the broad measure by more than half and eliminating a plan to provide legal immunity to producers of a gasoline additive blamed for water pollution.

The scaled-down energy bill would cost $13 billion to $14 billion over 10 years compared with $31 billion for the one that was blocked by a coalition of Republican and Democrats last fall, handing the Bush administration a defeat on one of its chief domestic initiatives. The savings would be achieved by reducing tax breaks for oil and gas companies and eliminating a new energy efficiency program for federal buildings, among other changes.

The legislation would still include a program to double the use of corn-based ethanol as a gasoline additive as well as steps intended to improve the reliability of the power grid, a response to last summer's widespread blackout.

Despite the revisions, the outlook for the energy measure remained uncertain. Leaders in the House, which approved the larger energy package last year, dismissed the new plan, particularly the lack of legal protection for makers of MTBE, the gasoline additive at the center of pollution lawsuits around the country.

"For the Senate to reopen the bidding just puts us longer into getting a bill that will provide for energy for this country and lessen our dependence on foreign energy," said the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who has insisted on the MTBE protection.

The Senate majority leader, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, and other backers of energy legislation were also thinking of trying to attach the new proposal to a highway and mass transit bill that is on the Senate floor, but that legislation has significant troubles of its own and its sponsors worried that the energy proposal could cause it to unravel entirely.

"I don't want to leave a land mine in the road of the highway bill," said Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, who said he backed both the highway and energy bills.

With the Senate making little progress on the transportation measure because of resistance from some Republicans and the White House over its $318 billion cost, Dr. Frist scheduled a vote for Thursday to cut off debate on the highway plan. But he conceded that the Senate might have to lower the cost of the transportation measure as well, saying President Bush made it clear during a White House meeting this week that it was too expensive.

The changes in the energy bill represented an acknowledgment by its Senate authors that the measure that failed last year stood no chance of advancing after it fell two votes short last November.

Since the defeat, support for the original bill has diminished further in a time of rising emphasis on the budget deficit.

Yet the White House has continued to press for some energy legislation and officials have stated that the prospect of oil production cutbacks by OPEC could have been softened had Congress acted when the president first laid out his energy policy three years ago.

Aides on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said the new proposal retained many central elements of last year's plan, including incentives to boost domestic oil and gas production, promote alternative energy sources and provide loan guarantees for a new natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 states.

To hold down the cost, the new bill would eliminate $1.1 billion in spending on coastal restoration in Louisiana and other states that have allowed oil and gas drilling off their shores and a $1.5 billion research project into deep offshore exploration. It would also eliminate a reduction in some royalties paid by companies that produce energy from federal lands.

Though the cost would be lowered, it is still almost double the level of tax incentives initially sought by the White House, which in its newly released budget also encouraged Congress to be less generous to energy producers.

Oil industry officials said they were disappointed that some of the financial incentives for added production might be delayed, but said they still intended to support the energy legislation and help shape it if it advances. Conservation groups, which helped defeat the bill last year, said the changes would not be enough to eliminate their opposition.

Senate leadership aides said Tuesday night that it was becoming unlikely that the highway and energy bills would be merged. Should the highway measure stall, Congress is likely to extend the current road building program, an approach that would leave state and local governments with less money than they might have gotten under a new bill.