Selling oil from the US' Strategic Petroleum Reserve to bring down gasoline prices would harm national security and limit the country's ability to respond to a possible supply disruption later in the year, a spokesman for Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican-Alaska, said Thursday.
Robert Dillon, Murkowski's spokesman, said a "very, very good chance" exists for a major oil supply disruption in the coming months if new Western sanctions against Iran work as intended. He said the US must save its strategic reserves until then.
"It's a fine line," Dillon said. "We're not saying the president can't use the SPR. We're saying there's an appropriate time to use the SPR -- and it may be right around the corner -- but it is certainly not because of high gas prices. It is because of the threat of a real supply disruption."
A tougher round of US sanctions against Iran takes effect June 28, and a European ban on Iran oil imports phases in fully on July 1.
The White House on Thursday dismissed as false a Reuters story saying the US and UK had reached an agreement to sell crude and petroleum products from their strategic stockpiles in response to rising prices (See stories, 1844, 1704, 1633 GMT).
Dillon's comments echo sentiment's Murkowski made in a March 1 letter to President Barack Obama. Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, asked Obama to resist the urge to open the SPR in reaction to an unusually early spike in retail gasoline prices.
"The Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists first and foremost as a critical safety net to be used in times of real emergency, rather than a lever to be pulled for political reasons," she wrote. "Rising gas prices are hurting us all, but draining the SPR just before we may have a critical need for it would be both shortsighted and reckless."
The SPR held 695.9 million barrels of crude oil as of February 29, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
Murkowski was one of the most vocal critics of the last SPR drawdown, when Obama offered 30 million barrels to the market in June 2011. The withdrawal made up half of a coordinated global release by the International Energy Agency to respond to a shortfall in Libyan supplies during that country's civil war.
Murkowski said at the time that she wanted to set some parameters on future drawdowns to remove the appearance of political motivation.
