There is a growing murmur all around.

Informed sources believe Washington is considering, rather seriously, releasing crude from its Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR), possibly as soon as this week if indeed nothing significant takes place.

Reports from Washington, quoting diplomatic sources, indicate that signals were sent to Riyadh — seeking reassurance that Saudi Arabia would not offset the SPR barrels by reducing its own supply.

Some also claim in the run-up to the Vienna June 8 fracas, Washington evaluated surprising crude markets with an unprecedented move — exchanging the urgently-needed high-quality crude oil stored in the US emergency reserve for heavier, low-quality oil from Saudi Arabia.

The swap idea as per the emerging reports, involved shipping some of the light low-sulfur, or “sweet,” crude out of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to European refiners, who needed it after the war in Libya cut off shipments of its premium crude varieties.

In return, Saudi Arabia was exhorted to sell its heavier high-sulfur or “sour” crude at a discount back to the US to top up the caverns holding America’s emergency stocks.

And it did not make past the drawing board, four sources familiar with the talks were quoted as saying.

There were hints that the pricing of the available, sour crude turned out to be a big impediment.

Washington reportedly insisted on discounted pricing for the sour crude.

And that was reportedly not palatable to the producers.

Indeed Riyadh has been clear on the issue — it cannot and will not tamper with the pricing of the crude. That is for the markets to decide — Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Ali Al-Naimi has been forthright in saying this in Vienna too.

And IEA, the OECD energy watchdog in the meantime, could also be seen stepping up the pressure, urging OPEC not only to steeply raise output, but also warning it was ready to order a release from stocks — at any time.

Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said Thursday the IEA was waiting to see how fast Saudi Arabia and other OPEC producers would deliver more oil to prevent what he called a “hard landing” for the global economy and that he stood ready to order a release from stocks at any time.

And at the same time, the issue of weak fundamentals appears back on the center stage.

A tightening supply-demand balance on the oil market meant the bull run since late 2010 was largely justified by fundamentals, the IEA now says, underlining that the levels of speculative activity were lower now than in 2008.

At this moment, however, ‘there was no indication of excessive speculative activity on oil markets, David Fyfe the IEA’s head of Oil Industry and Markets says.

Some efforts definitely had gone into this synchronization.

Earlier in April, Obama made a rare public call for world oil producers to boost production.

“We are in a lot of conversations with major oil producers like Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Reuters, quoting sources, says that Washington had pressed Saudi Arabia to boost oil production at least twice ahead of the (June 8) OPEC meeting. Industry sources described a “difficult” Riyadh meeting that a US delegation held about a month ago with Minister Ali Al-Naimi. They were told, ‘If you’re going to find us extra refineries that are asking for demand, we’ll supply that,’ an Arab official told Reuters.

Deputies from the US Energy and Treasury departments also visited Riyadh to make the case for stepped-up oil production, a Saudi source was quoted as saying, although the timing of this meeting remains unclear.

One of the officials who attended that meeting was Jonathan Elkind, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs at the Energy Department, a source told Reuters.

And interestingly within days, Elkind was seen flying to Paris for a regular meeting of the IEA board of governors.

After that meeting, the governing board released an unusually blunt statement urging OPEC to raise output and announcing that it would consider using “all the tools” at its disposal — a clear reference to emergency reserves.

Higher demand and reduced spare OPEC capacity will leave oil markets under greater strain between now and 2012 than previously thought, the International Energy Agency emphasized in its latest medium-term report released last Thursday.

The IEA Monthly Oil Report though conceding that OPEC May crude supply had risen by 210,000 barrels per day to 29.18 million bpd yet insisted it was still 1.25 million bpd below the pre-Libyan crisis.

The IEA said it was raising its 2011 call on OPEC crude by 400,000 bpd to 30.1 million bpd as filling this gap, between its call and current production levels, of around 1 million bpd would be needed between the second and third quarter.

“Global refinery crude demand is expected to rise sharply from a low point of 72.6 million bpd in April to 76.4 million bpd in July as US and European refiners exit turnarounds and replenish depleted oil product stocks for peak summer demand,” the IEA said.

Despite the Kingdom’s initiative to meet the global needs by endeavoring to increase its output to almost 10 million bpd, a definite cooling could be seen in the producer-consumer relationship. And this has already provoked a backlash from some in OPEC.

“Strategic reserves should be kept for their purpose and not used as a weapon against OPEC,” OPEC Secretary General Abdullah Al-Badri, told Reuters on the sidelines of the Global Energy and Climate Summit.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve can be a powerful tool, but in the past it has been reserved almost exclusively to aid US refiners caught in a genuine shortage of supply; the last SPR release came after the hurricane in 2005, when Gulf Coast oil fields and refiners were idled.

Its storage caverns in Texas and Louisiana have more than 700 million barrels of oil but most importantly they contain nearly 300 million barrels of sweet crude, which gives refiners a better yield of low-sulfur automotive fuels.

That’s theoretically enough to meet total US demand for more than two weeks.

“We never interfere in the IEA and really we don’t want them to interfere in our business. They should do it in a professional manner. We should not talk to each other through media,” Al-Badri hence insisted.

Yet, despite some recent setbacks, the very news that a swap concept may have been discussed — presents a definite silver lining in the overall otherwise grim and gray horizon.

It was a striking suggestion, one that would have demonstrated Washington’s readiness to put the SPR to extraordinary use and Riyadh’s willingness to work creatively with consumers to quell high prices — provided they met eye to eye on the remaining variables in the organization, some feel.

It may not have taken off the drawing boards at this instance, yet who knows what is in store for future.

At least the communication lines remain open and indeed the human ingenuity is at work — still.

That is a major consolation — in otherwise a grim scenario.