The Saudi king rebuffed President Bush's request for higher oil production, in the latest sign of how U.S. leaders are struggling to combat soaring energy costs that have become a major election-year issue.

The exchange between King Abdullah and Mr. Bush came on a day when crude-oil futures hit another record, up $2.17 per barrel to close at $126.29 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. With U.S. voters seething over gas prices, Congress is considering a grab bag of ideas: Withholding arms sales to Saudi Arabia until it ramps up production by one million barrels per day; opening up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to anticollusion lawsuits in the U.S.; and tightening regulation of oil trading.

The Saudis' cool response Friday to the volley of American pleas and threats underscores that the U.S., which relies on imports for about 60% of its 20-million-barrel-a-day oil habit, has no near-term prospect of managing prices down. But even as the administration pressed its request for more Saudi supplies, U.S. officials conceded the current level of Saudi production isn't the prime factor driving today's oil spike.

"There is something going on in this oil market that is more complicated than just turning on the spigot," White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters, recounting the president's afternoon meetings with Saudi officials at King Abdullah's farm.

Saudi officials told American officials that they believe prices are soaring due to a host of factors that they and independent analysts have been citing for several years now. Those include the falling value of the U.S. dollar; increased speculation and hedging in financial markets; geopolitical uncertainty in the Gulf region and other producing regions; refining capacity that often isn't well-suited for current production; and pessimism in some quarters about the long-term outlook for global oil supplies.