Originally Posted by Mako

Has nothing to do with OPEC or price gouging, OPEC is actually struggling to relieve price pressure. It has to do with increased gasoline demand in July/August, which overloaded our refineries ability to process oil, combined with Katrina knocking a dozen Gulf refineries offline during the same peak timeframe. Rita then appeared, and while not strong enough to do major damage, forced the accelerated restarts of the platforms/refineries to be put on hold another three weeks.