This week’s murder of Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three of his colleagues is dominating headlines and fueling outrage in America and the much of the world.

But when the smoke clears, the oil market may well wonder what further geopolitical chaos in the highly flammable Middle East means for crude oil prices.

The Obama administration was already mulling over the notion of tapping into the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) over concerns about tightening U.S. oil supply.

Last week Reuters reported that sources close to the White House say a late August meeting addressed the possibility of tapping into the SPR. Energy industry experts were used as a sounding board on the impact of such a move.

In particular, some say that the White House seems concerned about rising oil and gas prices in advance of the November elections. Crude oil is trading perilously close to the $100 per-barrel mark – the one benchmark level, energy experts say, that will gain the attention of the American consumer.

The average price of a regular gallon of gasoline, according to last week’s Fuel Gauge Report from The American Automobile Association, stands at $3.87 – once again close to the $4.00-per-gallon line that consumers don’t like to see crossed.

One source told Reuters that the White House is still in the “information-collection mode,” but a recent report from the U.K.-based Petroleum Policy Intelligence said the decision to tap into the reserves had already made and could occur “within days.”

Oil and Gas Investor reached out to energy industry experts and asked them what digging into the nation’s emergency oil reserves would mean for crude oil prices – and for energy investors.

“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was established as a safeguard against emergencies such as the cutoff of oil supplies from the Middle East like we saw back in 1973,” notes Chris Faulkner, CEO of Dallas-based Breitling Oil & Gas. “Even when oil prices, and thus gasoline prices, have spiked, previous presidents have been wary of tapping our reserves.”

Faulkner says that President George H.W. Bush drew on the reserve during the first Gulf War, and that President George W. Bush tapped the reserves following Hurricane Katrina, both of which were national emergencies. President Obama also dipped into the reserve in 2011, but it was not an emergency situation, Faulkner says.

In 2011, Obama tapped the reserve at a time of Libyan unrest that resulted in a supply disruption.

Barring severe fallout from the current turmoil in Libya, an emergency situation isn’t on the table this year.

In fact, Faulkner says, the move to peel off some of the country’s emergency oil reserves may have to do more with politics than it does with any global emergencies – even given what’s going on in Libya.

“The only emergency President Obama can cook up in order to justify another draw down on the SPR is high gasoline prices and the fact he’s begging to keep his job for another four years,” Faulkner says.

“A strategic release would provide a temporary relief, at best, and as the market remains thirsty for more crude the real issue would soon be to decide when to stop the release before it effectively makes a severe dent in the reserves and before it severely reduces the credibility and market effectiveness of future releases should they occur. The SPR is to protect national security, not for market manipulation.”

Faulkner provided some background information about the reserve.

“The SPR was created in 1975 by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), and in 1977 the first load of oil was being stored. Over the next several decades we hoarded approximately 700 million barrels for an average cost of $29 a barrel.

“The U.S. government requires a minimum of 90 days worth of demand to be stored. If President Obama releases oil today he will have to replace it at market rates – now $97 a barrel or roughly three times what we have it currently stored at. Releasing oil from the SPR will not affect global oil prices or gasoline prices. This means a release from the SPR, should it occur, will not impact stock prices in a negative way for any meaningful amount of time. In fact, a release may actually drive oil prices higher in the weeks following like it did the last time Obama tapped our reserves (in 2011).

Other industry experts agree.

“The White House would say that their reasoning for dipping into oil reserves would be because the market is undersupplied with crude oil,” says Andrew Holland, senior fellow for energy policy at the American Security Project. “I am afraid that the sole actual reason for tapping the reserve is because they see high gasoline prices as a potential weakness in the coming election.”

Asked to comment on what such a move would mean to the oil market, Holland hedges.

“There is no easy answer, other than it depends,” he says.

“It depends on how much is released, for how long and at what rate. It also depends whether it is timed to coincide with releases from other IEA members around the world. Any release would reduce prices somewhat, but a short-term release would only be the equivalent of a sugar rush that would push prices down, only to see them return to pre-release levels.”

With Libya in the spotlight for now, talk of a SPR release may heat up.

But, if the experts are right, it won’t have much of an impact on the oil market, and on oil and gas prices, no matter what’s happening on the first Tuesday of November.