Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., thinks North Dakotans' pain at the pump can be eased by stopping shipments to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and tightening regulations on oil market speculators.

Dorgan is sponsoring a measure, set to be voted on Tuesday, that would halt the government's daily deposit of 70,000 barrels of oil in the reserve, which is 97 percent full. Created in 1976, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was designated to tide the U.S. over if oil producing nations stop their shipments or if the country is in a war that prevents such shipments.

Dorgan said it's not good policy to continue these deposits when oil is above $120 a barrel, especially when that same oil could be released into the marketplace to increase supply and thus ease gas prices.

"It makes no sense to continue to do this," he told reporters at a Friday press conference.

His comments came on a day when oil closed at another record of above $126 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

With some Republican backers, including GOP presidential nominee John McCain and Gov. John Hoeven, Dorgan said he thinks he has the votes to get it through the Senate Tuesday.

To be sure, there are many in the Western North Dakota oil patch who have benefited greatly from the run-up in oil prices. But as a rural state populated with an energy-intensive agriculture industry and drivers who have to travel farther than in many other states for basic needs, North Dakota also feels the high gas price pinch quite hard.

Dorgan said he also will soon propose tighter regulations on people and individuals trading oil futures contracts in an attempt to rein in what he termed "a speculative bubble."

While Depression-era rules require stock buyers to pay for at least 50 percent of their purchase in cash, the regulations on trading oil are much looser. If people can make more of their bet on borrowed money, they can make bigger bets, thus causing a market to rise faster than it would with tighter borrowing requirements.

Tightening these requirements would wring a lot of the speculation out of the market, and bring the oil price down to where it would be if it were just based on the supply and demand of oil, Dorgan said.

"This is not a normal free market," he said of oil trading. "This is a perversion of the free market system."

(Reach reporter Jonathan Rivoli at 223-8482 or jonathan.rivoli@bismarcktribune.com.)