All of you people talking about the oil companies are ignoring entities that have even more control over the prices. Speculators, 30% of the contracts in June/July right around the time Oil was peaking.
They get called out, and suddenly oil starts collapsing. Seems to me that it wasn't the oil companies that were raking in the obscene profits. 30% of the market in futures, which means that the oil companies have even less control. Even the largest would be lucky to have 10% of the total market.
So if between Point A, which is the wellhead, and Point C. the refinery, some ass hat in Switzerland decides they are going to hijack the oil and store in aboard its super tanker in the middle of Atlantic by sitting on futures contracts and just letting the roll over indefinitely, keeping that oil out of play, it ends up altering the market. And that was just one company. One can easily imagine that the other speculator firms had another 20 - 30% of the market contracts. So in the end less than half of the market was actually being controlled by the suppliers and refiners.
Hardly an effective way to run a market, especially because it would drastically explain the run up that we are having. Of course, with the crash the Mutual Funds, and Hedge Funds that were screwing around in commodities had to pull their funds out of the futures markets and use them to buffer the Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds where they got their money to prevent the money from being withdrawn, making them a lot less influential than they were before.
Oil companies, hmmph, stop kidding yourselves, the oil companies pay maybe $5 - $10/gallon for pumping, so anything over $20 - $30/gallon is pure profit.
They might have been recording record revenues, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a middle man that was raking in even more.
To figure out how the market acted would require getting a lot of paperwork, from a lot of companies, that probably wouldn't be all that eager to report what they were doing with oil when it started its run up to $150/barrel.