According to a story from CNN/Money, Senators Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin are pushing for the creation of a gas reserve to protect the country against spikes in price spikes in the event of future natural or manmade disasters. Unlike the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which contains over 700 million barrels of crude oil, the gas reserve would be a stockpile of refined gasoline (40 million barrels) and jet fuel (7.5 million barrels). This would effectively remove any bottlenecks due to refinery capacity (such as we’ve been experiencing lately) and would therefore allow for more direct control over prices. Perhaps the biggest problem with this idea is that gasoline goes bad over time, so there would have to be a mechanism in place to keep the stockpile fresh.