A U.S. senator has a plan — and it’s a good one. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has a way for foreign countries to buy American oil, bypassing the senseless oil export ban.

“A top Republican senator on Tuesday provided a blueprint for foreign countries to acquire U.S. crude, as oil companies push for an end to the nation’s longstanding ban on exporting it and the Senate nears votes on the issue,” the Houston Chronicle’s Fuel Fix blog reports. “The document, prepared by Republican staff on the Senate Energy and Natural Works Committee and released by the panel chairwoman, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, notes that the Obama administration can allow greater oil exports to U.S. allies already — without any changes by Congress.”

The plan reads, “Exempting certain countries on a case-by-case basis, as the statutes and regulations currently allow, would be a partial and helpful step toward the modernization of U.S. energy policy.”

It’s not a complete fix — the ban itself needs to be lifted. But allowing sales country-by-country is a great start.

Oil exports make perfect sense.

A steep drop in the price of crude oil, from about $100 in mid-2014 to around $59 now, has slowed the “fracking” revolution.

“The oil industry is slashing thousands of jobs and looking at selling off assets in response,” the Dallas Morning News reports.

Alex Mills of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers explained recently why this makes sense.

“Oil production has grown more in the United States over the past five years than anywhere else in the world,” he wrote. “With these changes has come a widening gap among the types of oil that U.S. fields produce, the types that U.S. refiners need, the products that U.S. consumers want, and the infrastructure in place to transport the oil. Allowing companies to export U.S. crude oil as the market dictates would help solve this mismatch. Removing all proscriptions on crude oil exports will strengthen the U.S. economy and promote the efficient development of the country’s energy sector. Crude oil exports could generate upward of $15 billion a year in revenue by 2017 at today’s prices, according to industry estimates.”

Some worry that exporting oil could drive up gasoline prices, which already are starting to increase.

But research by Michael Plante, a senior research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, shows that lifting the export ban might lower prices at the pump, the Morning News countered. That’s also supported by a Congressional Budget Office report from December 2014, and a slew of other independent analyses.

How? By stabilizing the market and encouraging expanded exploration and extraction.

And then there’s the issue of jobs. With the restrictions in place, oil companies are pressured by simple economics to fund exploration and development in other countries. With the export ban lifted, those companies would inevitably do more in the U.S.

There’s even an environmental benefit. Crude oil produced here and sold on the world market is likely produced more cleanly than, say, crude from Russia.

Sen. Murkowski’s plan makes sense.