Comment by anon291

Let's think about this. The moment COVID happened, gas prices went way down because there was too much production and oil storage has high cost. From what I understand, oil production was then ramped down to meet the demand. When things opened up, suddenly there was higher demand but it takes time for production to come up.

This seems to me to be a simple adjustment. The oil company's profits went way down the quarter the pandemic started, due to a sudden demand shift. Now they're going above average due to the sudden demand shift in the other direction.

Oil is also weird since it's heavily determined by geopolitics. The Ukraine war must have had an impact but I haven't looked into it