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   Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, this afternoon, according to the news accounts released earlier today, the Environmental Protection Agency is calling on major oil refiners to meet in Washington, DC, to explain the price hike phenomenon, as it is called. This is not a phenomenon. It is a pain in the wallet what is happening with respect to the price of gasoline.

   I want to talk a little about that, and talk a little about the problems that may be causing it.

   It is not lost on the American people that when they drive to the gas pumps these days they are discovering, once again, another price spike in the cost of gasoline.

   In North Dakota, for example, the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association provided me with current gasoline prices in North Dakota: Minot, $1.79 a gallon today; Fargo, $1.64 a gallon; Devil's Lake, $1.69; Bismarck, $1.68 a gallon. Interestingly enough, the current price in Bismarck of $1.68 is nearly a 30-cent-per-gallon increase in just the last couple of weeks since the previous price spike. Earlier this year, the price of petroleum spiked up and came back down. Now it has spiked up again, a nearly 30-cent-per-gallon increase in a very short period.

   The EPA is asking for a meeting with the major oil refiners to evaluate what is happening with respect to the price of gasoline. Some indicate an EPA rule that describes the base fuel that must be used in certain cities in the country with respect to oxygenated fuel or ethanol as a circumstance where certain base fuels are kind of a narrow commodity and are not readily available and so it is pricing gasoline very high. That may be one case. I don't know the answer to that. I assume the EPA and the refiners will have that discussion. It is quite clear there are other things at work.

   No. 1, this country gets a substantial amount of its energy from the OPEC countries. In a global economy, the OPEC countries are producing an ever-increasing amount of the energy the United States needs. Does this put us at the mercy of the supply coming from the OPEC countries? Of course it does. When the OPEC countries cut supply, as they did, and then increase it marginally, but not increase it to the level where they had previously been producing, that is going to have some dislocation in this country. The result is an increase in gasoline prices.

   It is probably also the case, from hearings I have been involved with, that the refiners in this country were refining heating fuel for much longer than they normally would have and probably didn't switch over to gasoline quite quickly enough. Therefore, we are going to continue to see these price spikes. The news reports talk about volatility. Well, volatility is a euphemism for the price spikes that are jumping up and around with respect to the price of gasoline when we don't

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   What we have are three possibilities. The most obvious is, we are seeing an ever-increasing dependence on the OPEC countries. They cut back supply, then increased it some, but not nearly enough. The result is increased prices for petroleum products in this country.

   It ought to be a wake-up call for all of us. We are too dependent on foreign source energy. We ought to make certain we have a national energy policy that includes incentives for producers here at home, includes additional incentives for renewable energy. There isn't any reason we ought not be doing much better with respect to renewable energy in this country. The other possibility, aside from the OPEC industry, as I mentioned, is the potential of EPA recommendations or requirements that have created dislocation in certain markets in terms of the base supply that can be used with respect to ethanol.

   I don't know what the outcome of this meeting will be, but I will be very interested to see what the EPA has done, whether that has caused some dislocation and some price spikes as well.

   Third, it is not unlikely and certainly wouldn't be without precedent to have had the petroleum industry play some of their own games with respect to supply, the movement of supply and the pricing of supply. Some would say: Gosh, how could you think that? Well, history would bear out how I might be able to think that would be the case. We ought to look at all of these issues and evaluate exactly what is causing this price spike and what impact it is having and what we can do about it.

   I come from a State that is 10 times the size of Massachusetts. North Dakota is a big old State. It takes a lot of driving to get around my State; 640,000 people live in a land mass

   that is equivalent to 10 times the State of Massachusetts. Our predominant industry is farming. In order to seed a crop in the spring, it takes a lot of fuel. In order to get the crop off the fields in the fall, it takes a lot of fuel. Those family farmers, with the kind of depressed grain prices we have seen in this country, don't need further increases in input costs placed upon them by these increases in gas prices.

   We have to get some answers from the EPA, the petroleum refiners, the major oil companies, and from those who are supposed to be involved in the development of an energy plan for this country to answer what kind of dependence do we have on the OPEC countries and what could the consequences be in the longer term, if those countries decided to have a much tighter supply of petroleum going to Western nations, including the United States.

   I was reading a briefing memo this morning about this issue. I thought a couple of pieces of information were interesting. OPEC officials contend that prices are only marginally above the stated ban and ``the price rise is more due to a tight gasoline market in the United States where new environmental regulations are reducing volume.'' That is according to OPEC. OPEC is saying: It's not us.

   The fact is, OPEC cut supply, increased it some but not nearly back to where they had originally been producing.

   The Saudi Arabia oil minister also pegged the recent price movement on tight oil products markets; that is, oil products markets, not a shortage of crude oil itself. One source indicated that the increase in prices on certain world oil markets, notably in the U.S., has no relation to the volume of international crude output. That is an interesting theory. That would stand all logic on its head. Prices in the United States with respect to crude oil have no relationship to international crude oil production. I think that is not likely to be something that would be believed by anyone who is thinking.

   The point is this: This is a significant and important issue to many areas of our country. We need to understand the consequences of it, what is causing it, and what we can do about it. I hope all of us working together can rely on not only the Energy Department, the EPA, but the Congress itself to evaluate all three of the suggestions I have just made.

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