With light, sweet crude oil at just over $110 a barrel this week, and the average price at the pump for regular unleaded at $3.35 per gallon, all three presidential candidates have called for a halt in the filling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to combat high oil and gas prices.  Meanwhile, the Energy Department is proceeding with President Bush’s plan to double the capacity of the reserve to 1.5 billion barrels.

Senator John McCain said this week, “suspending purchases into the reserve will lessen worldwide demand for oil, and if the classic laws of supply and demand hold, we should see a welcome decrease in the price of oil.”  Senators Barack Obama (D-Illinois) and Hillary Clinton (D-New York) have also called for suspension of the filling of the oil reserve.

Legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) would suspend filling the reserve for the rest of the year if oil is more than $50 a barrel.  The trucking industry has asked the administration to release oil from the reserve to combat record diesel prices, which rose to a national record of just over $4.04 a gallon this week.

At a February 6 hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman argued that continuing to fill the reserve is needed to meet a U.S. Commitment to the 27-nation International Energy Agency to have enough oil stockpiled to ensure the daily use of 20 million barrels for 90 days by 2025.  Secretary Bodman went on to say doing this would not affect prices “in any meaningful way.”  The reserve holds just over 700 million barrels of oil and has a capacity to hold 727 million barrels.