Bush faces election-yr pressure to use oil reserve

By Tom Doggett -Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush may be tempted to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve this election year to help the Republican nominee he hopes will succeed him, but the impact on lowering gasoline prices and thus winning over voters would likely be small.

The Republican nominee in this year's U.S. presidential election is likely to pressure the White House to use the emergency oil stockpile, especially if he is far behind his Democratic counterpart in the polls.

"Bush may come under a lot of pressure to act before people's minds are made up that there's no way they're going to vote for a Republican," said Daniel J. Weiss, an energy expert at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

However, past releases of oil from the reserve lowered prices for only a short period.

Former President Bill Clinton was accused of using low winter fuel supplies as an excuse to release some 30 million barrels of oil from the reserve in late September 2000, just weeks before that year's presidential election, to help the Democratic nominee, Clinton's then-vice president, Al Gore.

The result: The price of oil dropped about $1 a barrel over the next week and gasoline fell about 4 cents a gallon before rising again.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, created by Congress in response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, now holds about 698 million barrels of crude at four underground storage sites in Texas and Louisiana.

The United States consumes 21 million barrels of oil a day.

Tapping into the SPR "may provide some relief, but as the market would not expect that release of oil to continue, the price impact would be limited," said Tancred Lidderdale, oil analyst at the federal Energy Information Administration.

"It's a temporary pill for an ongoing migraine," said Lidderdale, referring to the reality that global oil demand is growing faster than new oil production.

At this point, Bush said he will not play politics with the SPR, as many perceived President Clinton as doing.

"As you might remember, this was an issue in the 2000 campaign where I clearly said we would not tap the SPR for political purposes," Bush told Reuters in an Oval Office interview last week.

"The SPR is available for emergencies, terrorist attacks, massive dislocations and that's what it's there for," he said.

'A POLITICAL GESTURE TO BUY VOTES'

Still, if this year's Republican presidential nominee is trailing his Democratic counterpart, some will see that as a political emergency that could be helped by releasing reserve oil to ease pump prices and please voters.