House Republicans today fired a pre-emptive volley at President Obama over gas price spikes projected for the coming months, the latest sign that the Keystone XL pipeline will join offshore drilling as a GOP political cudgel in the run-up to November's election.

Rising costs at the pump are an annual ritual as the summer driving season approaches, but today's release from the office of House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was notable for its early arrival -- a full month before the first anniversary of last year's calls for Obama to release crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to help cool oil-price volatility (E&E Daily, March 4, 2011).

After stating that last year's gas price uptick "hammered small businesses and working families, causing the unemployment rate to jump," McCarthy spokesman Mike Long added: "While the president did nothing, then ultimately decided to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve -- House Republicans put forth an energy agenda that would increase domestic production and security to bring down gas prices, and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs."

McCarthy's jab also talked up the Keystone XL pipeline -- proposed to route more than 700,000 barrels per day of Canadian oil sands crude to the Gulf Coast -- in addition to the offshore drilling expansion typically touted by his party as a cure for rising crude prices. Long ended his release by asking if Obama would "again choose the SPR in lieu of job-creating projects like the Keystone pipeline and" the Republican transportation bill that boosts coastal and Alaskan drilling.

While the oil industry contends that Keystone XL would drive down U.S. gas prices, the argument remains unproven and potentially reliant on an assumption that refiners would not attempt to pass on higher feedstock cost to consumers (Greenwire, Jan. 31).

Analysts credited Obama's June sale of 30 million barrels of crude from the SPR, coupled with a concurrent release from the International Energy Agency's stockpiles, with helping generate a short-term downturn in oil prices -- although a number of other global factors were also behind the up-and-down course of crude costs (Greenwire, June 28, 2011).