Umm, actually the price is determined by how quickly it can be refined. You have a point but it's hardly that simple. You have commodity traders speculating in oil futures, that affects the price of the crude. The quality of the crude is also a factor in what can be produced from it. There's the fact that the fucking tree-hugging Panda-humpers have not let us build a new refinery in over 30 years, combined with the twice yearly "change over" to winter formulation in the snow belt, which can take a refinery off line for a week or more. Then you ad in the price gouging, which is NOT the same thing as profit. Price fixing is illegal, and don't try to tell me that they don't do it. I would not be surprised if there was some "creative" book keeping going on either. The Oil companies pay out huge sums of money to congressmen and always manage to avoid any serious investigation into their business practices.
The problem is that the oil companies don't seem to be acting like independent organizations. What one does, they all do. The free market would suggest that they should be fighting each other for business resulting in the best possible price at the pump, but it's not happening. The price at the pump is nearly uniform despite brand name or parent company. The oil companies say the price of oil is to blame, well my family has mineral rights and we get a percentage of everything they pump out. If the price of oil at the well head is higher then we should be seeing a larger check every month. We don't. The price at the well head has not changed nearly as much as the price at the pump. Yet in the first quarter of this year, one oil company (Exxon, I think) posted 300% of their projected profits. 300%!
I smell a rat.
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Four Wheels Move the Body, Two Wheels Move the Soul.