U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Friday he and his team are working with the White House’s National Security Council to monitor the situation in the Middle East and any potential impacts to global energy supply.
Wright said on X, after Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites and Iran’s response of missiles on Israel, that President Donald Trump’s policy of maximizing U.S. oil and gas output, which also involves slashing pollution regulations, has boosted U.S. energy security.
Oil and gas sites in Iran, an OPEC member, have not been targeted, analysts have said.
Global crude oil prices spiked on Friday, settling 7% higher at more than $74 per barrel on investor worries about conflict spreading to the wider Middle East.
And U.S. gasoline prices could rise about 20 cents a gallon in coming days during peak U.S. summer driving season “creating economic pressures and political headwinds for President Donald Trump, who campaigned on lowering energy costs,” analysts at ClearView Energy Partners said in a note to clients.
ClearView said higher prices could push Trump to focus on tapping strategic petroleum reserves, seeking supply additions from the OPEC+ production group, and could complicate efforts to tighten sanctions on Russia, one of the world’s top three oil producers.
The U.S. Energy Department did not immediately respond to a question about the potential to tap the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the world’s largest, which currently holds 402.1 million barrels of crude.
Fatih Birol, the head of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, said on X that the IEA oil security system, which includes the U.S. SPR, has more than 1.2 billion barrels of emergency stocks.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries slammed Birol’s post, saying on X it raises false alarms and “projects a sense of market fear.”
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner Editing by Marguerita Choy)