That’s called supply and demand - global refined product demand is at/above pre-Covid levels, global refining capacity has been reduced (partly due to Russian war/covid/feedstock conversions). That’s why you see historically high crack spreads.

For a few more details, US refinery capacity is down 5% or 1 million barrels per day from pre-COVID figures, so once the economy started unfreezing from that demand exceeded supply. Worldwide it's 3 million bpd. For the US, a significant part of the loss in distillate production was being made up by imports from Russia, which of course have been ended by sanctions.

Aside from undoing the sanctions, there's physically no way to fix this in the medium term aside from demand destruction from a recession or worse. In the medium to long term oil companies are not going to make major investments that will never be paid back because of anti-fossil fuel policies.

> But bear in mind also that the price of gasoline is not directly tracking the price of oil

There's always been a substantial lag. Production/shipping always takes time, plus you've got the sticky price effect to contend with. The falling price of crude today will result in cheaper prices at the pump later this year, but not immediately.

If you’re talking about retail gas prices a lot of that is inventory driven. Think about it, if I buy a tanker truck of diesel that takes a week to sell @$3/gal and prices start to rise, sure I’ll rapidly match prices, but maybe be willing to be a bit cheap (since I make most of my money on the convenience store), but now fast forward 6 months and I buy a cargo @5.5 and prices start to drop, I’m going to be inclined to lower prices as slowly as I can try to limit at how much of a loss as I going to sell my fuel high cost basis fuel (where it becomes a little anti-consumer is I can probably rely on the station across the street to be in the bind, and so neither of us are in a rush to mark to market until we have newer lower cost basis inventory)

That's likely true, too. I'm hopeful that we will, indeed, see some drop in the price of gas (though frankly, I'm also expecting to see prices rise again before winter...which is going to be rough in some places).

But from what I understand, gas prices also rose much faster in proportion to the price of oil than they have in past oil price spikes. And while I haven't seen any numbers specifically for oil/gas companies, we've definitely been seeing record profits alongside the rising prices in various places these past few months.

I can't claim that it's the whole of the current inflation, but there's definitely some opportunistic price gouging going on.

Dollars are dollars so if a companies profit is up 9% yoy and inflation is 9% yoy, real profit increase is 0%.