(FROM WASHINGTON POST
I am not absolutly an expert, but somebody has realized that gas prices have to be lowered, ASAP. Next step? I do not know, but this is the first battle. We are going to win this war)
The United States and its industrial allies in the International Energy Agency announced Wednesday that they would release 60 million barrels of crude oil from reserves over the next 30 days. The news immediately sent oil prices down about 5 percent.
The release would be the biggest ever coordinated from strategic reserves, and over the next month it would exceed the amount of oil lost on world markets since the fighting in Libya. Half of the release would come from U.S. reserves.
According to a senior administration official, President Obama made the decision out of concern that the drop in oil production in the Middle East was slowing economic growth in the United States and abroad. The official was authorized to speak only on condition of anonymity.
The unexpected announcement was at odds with Obama’s remarks this spring that such a move would be unlikely. At a March press conference, shortly after the start of hostilities in Libya, the president seemed skeptical of the idea of using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
“Libya, for example, does not account for a large portion of overall world production,” Obama said in March. “Basically even if Libyan oil production was suspended for a significant period of time because of the unrest there, we’d be able to fill that gap.”
Obama said the Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists for “a severe disruption in supply.” He suggested that high oil prices were being driven by “uncertainty in the oil markets — part of it prompted by the fact that the economy is growing faster in some places than others, but you’ve got China and India and Brazil and other emerging nations that are using more and more energy as their economies advance.”
On Wednesday, the administration said it would also consider taking additional steps to bring down the price of oil at the end of the 30 days. But it did say what those steps might be.
“The U.S. stands ready to do more, as and if necessary, to address this issue,” the administration official said. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday that “as we move forward, we will continue to monitor the situation and stand ready to take additional steps if necessary.”
Recent data on the nation’s economic recovery have been grim, with the unemployment rate around 9 percent. Gas consumption is rising with the summer driving season, and the increase in oil could bring some relief to consumers at the pump and to economies that have been struggling to recover from economic downturn.
U.S. and IEA officials said that unrest in Libya had taken 140 million barrels off the market so far this year, virtually all of it the high-quality type of oil that is easiest to refine and turn into gasoline. The IEA said that “although there are huge uncertainties, analysts generally agree that Libyan supplies will largely remain off the market for the rest of 2011.”
According to the Energy Department, the 30 million-barrel release would be the largest ever from the U.S. strategic reserves.
