One of the Senate's top Democrats yesterday joined a growing chorus of lawmakers urging the Obama administration to tap into the nation's petroleum stockpile to alleviate soaring crude oil prices.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate Democratic whip, said tapping into the nation's 727-million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) would ensure that rising gasoline prices wouldn't affect economic recovery.

"We need to consider moving toward the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to put the oil we have in reserve into the economy, to try to temper this increase in gas prices," he said yesterday on CNN's "State of the Union." "This isn't helping our recovery."

Durbin's comments come as a growing group of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill have urged the president to sell off some of the stockpile to help lower gasoline prices. Durbin joins Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and House Natural Resources ranking member Ed Markey (D-Mass.), among others, in calling for a petroleum reserve sale.

But President Obama said Friday that he wasn't ready to dip into the stockpile just yet.

"The idea behind the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is if there was a severe disruption in supply, similar to what happened in the '70s, for example, when you had the -- OPEC making a decision not to sell for a while, how would our economy continue to function, and making sure that we've got sufficient supplies for that," Obama said Friday during a news conference. "Right now, what we're seeing is not a shortage of supply. Refineries are actually operating at fairly full capacity at the moment."

Obama said he was "confident" about the United States' current ability to fill any potential supply gaps that would generate another price spike. But he didn't rule out the possibility of an SPR sale.

"If we see significant disruptions or, you know, shifts in the market that are -- are so disconcerting to people that we think a Strategic Petroleum Reserve release might be appropriate, then we'll take that step," he said.

Durbin and other Democrats in Congress think Obama should sell off some reserves now.

"I'm worried that if we don't use the reserve, that our economic recovery will stall and fall backwards," Durbin said.

Not all Democrats are urging Obama to dip into the reserves, and Republicans are generally opposed to the idea. Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Mark Begich (D-Alaska) both said last week that the reserve should be used only during emergencies and the current price spike didn't qualify as such. The two oil-state Democrats and Republicans say the administration should ramp up domestic oil production instead to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

Democrats, too, say the United States should reduce foreign oil imports.

"We need to think about what we need to do as a nation to move forward," Durbin said. He touted energy efficiency and said, "We need to look and see what other things are available to us."