By Sheila Dang
MIDLAND, Texas, Aug 17 (Reuters) – U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Monday that Washington will announce steps within days to help refiners boost fuel output, as President Donald Trump seeks to rein in stubbornly high gasoline prices that spiked during the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
U.S. refiners are already running at strong rates as high fuel prices have lifted margins.
“The United States refineries are running at record high, but we have refineries in the Middle East that are turned down,” Wright told reporters at an oil rig site operated by ExxonMobil.
He met with refiners on Monday “about what we can do in the government to help them further ramp up their throughput,” Wright said in Midland, Texas, in the Permian Basin, the heart of the U.S. oil industry. Increasing refinery output in the U.S. and elsewhere was the key to lowering gasoline prices, he said.
Persistently high pump prices above $4.00 a gallon are a risk for Trump’s Republican party which will be campaigning to retain narrow majorities in both houses of Congress during November’s midterm elections.
The average U.S. price for regular gasoline is more than $4.06 a gallon, according to motorist group AAA, up more than $1 per gallon from a year ago, or nearly 30% higher.
‘LONG GAME’ WITH IRAN
Trump told a political rally in New York on Friday that paying “a tiny little bit more for your gasoline” was worth it to ensure “a very evil country” could not obtain a nuclear weapon, one of the reasons he has cited for the war.
Wright told reporters in Midland that Trump was asking Americans to “bear with him” because the world cannot afford Iran having a nuclear weapon.
Wright later told Fox News that 30 ships transited the Strait of Hormuz on both Saturday and Sunday and added that Iran “can’t export any oil right now.” When asked if traffic through the strait between Iran and Oman could reach pre-war levels of 20 million barrels per day, Wright said he did not know the future, “but I will tell you we’re going to continually get better at escorting traffic out, and the power of Iran is going to continue to shrink.”
When asked by Fox whether Trump has latitude to wait Iran out as economic sanctions and the embargo of Iranian oil through the Strait of Hormuz tighten, Wright said: “I think he does. The president is playing the long game.”
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Midland and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Mark Potter and David Gregorio)
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