Then-President Bill Clinton ordered a sale of that oil from the national stockpile, which helped push down crude prices more than $4 a barrel, or 12 percent, to under $33 a barrel through the presidential election in November.

This year, President Bush faces record crude futures around $55 a barrel, spurred by hurricane damage to oil production from the Gulf of Mexico, growing world demand for oil, and, once again, anemic heating oil supplies.

And, in an unprecedented move this week, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is pumping oil at the highest rates in 25 years, asked the United States to tap its oil reserves to relieve prices.

So far, the Energy Department has loaned 5.4 million barrels of high-quality sweet oil to refiners, 82 percent less oil than the 2000 release.

Experts say a sale of reserve oil similar to Clinton's four years ago, would be tough to pull off this year, especially after George. W. Bush and Dick Cheney heavily criticized it in 2000 as a political act to help reelect Democratic candidate Al Gore.

Bush does not want to be accused of a political flip-flop on the stockpile, analysts said. "This administration doesn't want to be accused of playing politics with the crude reserve," said Aaron Brady, analyst at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Bush's energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, has repeatedly said the reserve should be used only for severe disruptions from suppliers.

But Hurricane Ivan has shut in more than 25 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, about what the entire country uses in 30 hours, and Bush's loans from national reserves has only replaced about 20 percent of that.

"I don't think they should be at all hesitant to at least offset those shut-in volumes," said Linda Stuntz, former deputy secretary of the Department of Energy under the first President Bush.