WASHINGTON (AP) – House Democrats attacked a Republican energy bill Wednesday, contending it provides billions of dollars to highly profitable energy companies while doing little to promote alternative fuels and energy conservation or to address soaring gasoline prices.

Nevertheless, lawmakers said the bill is likely to be approved by the House on Thursday, setting the stage for a battle in the Senate over the nation’s energy agenda.

Opponents of the legislation, which covers more than 1,000 pages, were planning to try to strip from the bill its call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and to impose tougher fuel economy requirements on automakers.

Similar attempts have been unsuccessful, and GOP leaders said they are confident these will fail as well.

As lawmakers began the energy debate on the House floor, President Bush called for Congress to give him an energy bill by this summer and “send an important signal” that the country “is serious about solving America’s energy problems.” Congress has failed to agree on energy legislation, despite repeated tries, during the last four years.

In a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Bush said he wished he “could wave a magic wand and lower gas prices tomorrow” but said the nation’s energy problems took years to develop and are “not going to be solved overnight.”

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California accused Bush of trying to exploit people’s anxiety over high gas prices to gain support for a bill that she said “was written by energy lobbyists for the benefit of the energy industry.” She said it would neither lower energy prices nor curtail America’s growing reliance on oil imports.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the legislation’s floor leader, called the bill balanced and said if it becomes law it will provide for a more diversified array of domestic energy sources from coal, oil and gas to nuclear and renewable such energy from biomass, ethanol and wind.

“Midterm and long term, if the bill becomes law, we’ll see prices stabilized,” Barton said at a news conference with Majority Leader Tom DeLay, also of Texas, who accused Democrats of being “obstructionists.”

“There are those that do not want a solution, they just want the bill to fail,” DeLay said.

The House bill would include more than $8.1 billion in tax breaks, almost all directed at traditional energy industries; allow oil exploration in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; and make it easier to build liquefied natural gas import terminals, even if states or local communities oppose the project.

Some lawmakers were incensed that they could not debate on the House floor a provision in the bill that would give makers of MTBE, a gasoline additive that is contaminating drinking water, a shield against product liability lawsuits by communities facing expensive cleanup costs.

The bill gives MTBE makers “safe harbor” and will leave communities and water districts with billions of dollars in cleanup costs, said Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., who had prepared an amendment to remove the MTBE section. She also wanted to remove a provision that gives MTBE makers, including some of the biggest oil companies, $2 billion in transition assistance as MTBE is phased out over the next nine years. GOP leaders did not accept either amendment.

The MTBE liability issue has been a top priority for DeLay, who was instrumental in getting into the legislation a measure that would funnel $2 billion over 10 years for research into recovering oil and gas from extremely deep areas of the Gulf of Mexico.

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., joined Democrats in criticizing the bill’s “massive tax breaks for profitable oil companies” while providing “next to nothing for new technologies that would help wean us from foreign oil” through improved energy efficiency.

Among other provisions in the bill are those to:

-Require for refiners to use 5 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol by 2012, a 20 percent increase over what the industry is expected to produce this year, and a boon to farmers.

-Expand of daylight-saving time by two months, so it would start on the first Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday in November.

-Provide tax breaks to spur the construction of natural gas pipelines and improve the nation’s electricity grid. It also would require grid operators to comply with mandatory reliability standards instead of industry self-regulation.

-Provide $1.8 billion in incentives for development of less polluting “clean coal” projects.

AP-ES-04-20-05 1810EDT