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DENVER (KDVR) — Colorado is at the forefront of some possible options to lower gas prices.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sent oil prices as high as $115 a barrel, deepening a pandemic inflation spiral. The price of a gallon of gas keeps climbing in the U.S. The week of Feb. 21 clocked gas of any kind at $3.41 per gallon, the highest price since 2014.

Colorado has lower gas prices than the nation at large, but they have been rising with the rest of the states nonetheless.

AAA listed the state price per gallon of unleaded gasoline at $3.37 most recently. That’s a two-cent bump in a week, a seven-cent bump in a month and a 73-cent bump in a year.

Broadly, there are two basic solutions to ease gas prices at the pump for Americans, according to Colorado State University Department of Economics Chair Elissa Braunstein: putting more oil on the market or lowering prices directly.

Changing domestic production regulations, she said, would take too much time to materialize in prices at the pump. Instead, she said immediately getting more oil barrels into the global market would be faster.

Potentially, this means leaning on oil-producing countries. She also says the Biden administration could lift the sanctions put on Iran during Donald Trump’s presidency and allow them to introduce large stockpiles of ready-to-go oil.

In any case, domestic production would run crossways to Biden’s environmental goals.

“I think what you’re seeing the Biden administration doing is resisting, at least in the short term, changing these longer-term environmental goals in an effort to address these short-term pressures,” Braunstein said. “There are other ways to do that.”

Instead, the administration could lift taxes.

“Part of the price of gas is the tax,” she said. “So if one has a short-term issue with price increases not so much around supply, but volatility, this jumpiness in markets, that’s an example of a decision they could take to lessen the impact on consumers at the pump.”

State leaders have already started a scaled-down version. Gov. Jared Polis recently cut the gas fee he’d put in place last year. At the federal level, Congress is considering a bill that would suspend the federal gas tax entirely for the remainder of 2022.