HOUSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government can do nothing in the short-term to ease the pain of a spike in fuel prices that is threatening to tip the economy into recession, a senior official at the Department of Energy said on Monday.

“It is clear that there is no silver bullet here. It took us decades to get into the current energy situation and it is going to take us some time to get out of it,” the DOE’s acting deputy secretary Jeff Kupfer told Reuters at the Global Energy Summit in Houston.

U.S. retail gasoline prices averaged $3.98 a gallon on Monday, up more than 25 percent from a year ago tracking a dramatic surge in the price of crude oil, according to auto and travel group AAA’s daily survey of about 100,000 service stations.

The head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration told Reuters in New York on Monday that gasoline prices will peak at an average of $4.10 this summer and crude prices are likely to stay over $100 a barrel through 2009.

Oil prices have risen six-fold since 2002 to around $130 a barrel as rising demand in China and other developing nations strains supply.

Economists have said that the spike in oil prices could trigger a recession in the United States, already hard hit by a housing slowdown and credit crunch.

Kupfer said the Department of Energy was seeking to navigate the United States out of the energy crunch in the long-term by promoting alternative fuels, energy conservation, and additional production of conventional fuels around the globe.

He added that the United States was asking OPEC to raise output to help meet the rising demand from Asia.

“The more supply that OPEC can put on the market, the better it would be for all of us,” he said.

OPEC has repeatedly rebuffed calls for more production, saying that supplies are currently adequate.

(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)