3:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time May 07, 2015

    WASHINGTON, May 7 (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski

said on Thursday she will unveil a bill next week that would

reverse the 40-year-old ban on U.S. oil exports. 

    Murkowski, the Republican chairwoman of the Senate Energy

and Natural Resources Committee, said she would unveil the bill

on Tuesday, although it was uncertain when the measure would get

a vote in her committee. Murkowski has been one of the biggest

supporters of reversing the ban Congress passed in 1975 after

the Arab oil embargo led to fears of energy shortages. 

    

Pried loose from tomorrows batch in another thread..

The U.S. can wait to lift the ban on crude exports because slowing production will give refiners time to handle the type of oil produced in shale plays, Energy Information Administration chief Adam Sieminski said. While producers could earn more money selling oil overseas because of the spread between the global and U.S. benchmarks, it may not be necessary for the government to act now, he said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Houston bureau. “If there was a wall that light tight oil production is going to hit in refining capacity ability to process—that’s one of the theories—the pace that production was approaching that wall, the speed, has slowed down,” Sieminski said. “From that standpoint, it probably means it might not be as critical for a policy maker to decide immediately to do something about that.”

Not ‘critical’ for U.S. to lift oil export ban now, EIA chief says

It's probably going to happen anyway, although perhaps not immediately. We're not living in the 1970s anymore and in case of some kind of international crisis compromising supplies it can be reinstated, I would think.