The two US senators from Maine, the state most reliant on home heating oil, asked President Donald Trump this week to tap the country’s emergency stash of the fuel as diesel prices soar to record levels and push up household bills.
“We write to request that you release home heating oil from the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve to protect Mainers from the very high prices that are imposing a difficult financial burden,” Senators Susan Collins, a Republican, and Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, wrote in a letter to Trump on Tuesday.
Collins, who is in a tight race for her seat in the November midterm elections, told Reuters in a statement the cost of energy is a “huge issue in my state” and that tapping the reserve “would help put downward pressure on prices.”
Maine households are paying about $675 more to fill a heating oil tank than they did last year, the senators said, citing a Maine Department of Energy Resources survey. Prices for diesel, which is similar to heating oil, have surged to a record over $6.50 a gallon as the wars in Iran and Ukraine have crimped production of fuels and petroleum shipments.
The White House did not immediately respond to a query about the letter.
Collins also joined Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat of Rhode Island, in asking the administration to release home heating program money to help low-income households.
The reserve, which stores 1 million barrels of diesel in four sites from Maine to New Jersey, was created in 2000 by former President Bill Clinton. It holds roughly 10 days of heating oil for the region and has not been tapped since 2012, when it provided fuel to emergency responders in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Trump’s budget last year proposed to shut the reserve, which is expensive to maintain.
The soaring diesel price has spurred calls for a ban on exports of the fuel, but the White House on Wednesday denied a news report that said the administration is preparing a 90-day ban on diesel exports.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Sonali Paul)