Speaking to a news channel during a visit to California, Rice also dismissed fears that the US economy was losing its competitive edge to China and India.
"It's very important that we diversify (energy) supply," Rice said in the interview taped Thursday.
"We say we want to be less addicted to foreign oil, but then we say to oil producers you have to increase supply rather than thinking about what we can do at home to increase supply.
"The ability to use our domestic resources, our domestic sources of oil would be a very important part of that."
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It was also important for the United States to increase its oil refining capacity.
"Nuclear energy is another clean technology that we should be using and exploring," she said.
"We simply have put ourselves into a situation in which it's hard to break our addiction to oil," Rice added.
Rice acknowledged the US was experiencing hard times but sought to dispel any ideas that the US economy was losing its competitive edge to the booming Chinese and Indian economies.
"I can count many, many times that people have said that America had lost its competitive edge," Rice said, recalling claims in the 1980s that the United States was losing out to Japan.
"So there have been many premature sentences for America losing its competitive edge."