PETROLEUM Possibilities in the Pipeline.

One of the defining goals of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, on energy policy, is to reduce the country's dependence on foreign sources of oil. Despite being the world's second largest producer after Saudi Arabia, the country imports 56% of its oil from overseas, with a quarter coming from politically and economically volatile countries in the Middle East, according to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy.Advances in technology have continually enabled geologists to find new oil and natural gas deposits and extract them economically from hard-to-reach places. So estimates of the amounts of recoverable petroleum are rising. In 2002, these figures are half again as large as they were in 1970, when some experts predicted that the country would be short of crude oil by the year 2000 or shortly thereafter. The U.S. has only 3% of the world's recoverable crude oil but consumes nearly 25% of its annual oil production. Roughly two-thirds of the world's proven crude oil reserves lie in countries that belong to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran and Venezuela. INSET: Nuclear Resurgence.