Non-Political Description
Energy Recovery is an engineering phrase that describes any method of using the energy contained in a waste product of a larger process. Simple examples of this would be:

• incorporating heat exchange equipment to reduce energy costs by extracting heat from a facility’s exhaust air stream before it is vented outside.
• Incinerating garbage and waste material and using the heat to produce steam in order to power another industrial process.

Political Description
Raw material extraction processes such as drilling for oil & natural gas.

Political Benefit
The Bush administration and the petroleum industry have started using the phrase energy recovery as a euphemism for oil drilling and extraction. Stating a desire to drill for oil & natural gas invokes imagery of large oil derricks, off-shore oil platforms, large spinning oil pumps as well as the attached stigmas as oil spills, iridescent ocean slicks, black greasy beaches, dead oil-soaked wildlife. This is certainly not an image the industry and its supporters want to promote. By definition, energy recovery is not drilling for oil and gas. Raw materials are not energy and you can only recover something that you once had but have since lost.

Energy recovery is a politically sterile term that doesn’t have any liabilities embedded in it. It is a process that increases the total efficiency of a another process by reducing wasted energy, which in itself is relatively eco-friendly, and misappropriates it to veil the environmental risks inherent in drilling and extraction while also lending an air of environment-friendly concern to the subject. Raw material extraction would be much more accurate neutral term for oil drilling but it doesn’t do much to diminish the negative connotations.

Reference Point
The oil and gas industry as well as others who share same political view. This euphemism has largely been avoided by the mainstream media and government publications though has been increasingly used by pro-drilling politicians in the last few months.

History
The oil industry has used the term “oil recovery rate” for quite some time to describe how much an oil field’s estimated total holding can be profitably extracted. The industry also has a history of using the term oil recovery interchangeably with oil extraction. Only in recent times has that been replaced with the more politically friendly energy recovery term. Whether the increasing use of the term is a result of the American Petroleum Industry’s image makeover that they embarked on in 2007 is hard to know.

Example Usage

From The New York Times

The Exxon Corporation said that it planned to increase sharply its spending in the United States on enhanced energy recovery, the coaxing of oil and natural gas out of properties where deposits cannot be reached by conventional means.

The Exxon U.S.A. division of the world’s largest oil company will spend $150 million on enhanced recovery projects this year, an outlay ”more than four times as large” as its 1980 expenditures for similar ventures, a spokesman said.