Russia goes to war in Ukraine and gasoline jumps to 5 dollars a gallon.

A war breaks out in the ME with the strait of Hormuz being shut down and gasoline is only 3.64 a gallon.

This is a big windfall for the oil and gas industry.

Oil they bought at $60 per barrel is being sold to consumers priced as if it was oil bought at $100 per barrel.

The US is one of them. Italy, England, Japan are among the others.
So, that actually is happening.
Prices went up despite that.
Here, prices are up as much as 70 cents, but it dropped a nickel yesterday.

If the strait of Hormuz is shut down for a month, crude will be 150 dollars a barrel.

By definition, it's temporary. One can't top off a reserve while drawing from it.
I don't agree on your price prediction though.
80% of that, maybe.

It's a game. If the word goes that out that crude oil prices will go up, station owners immediately jack up their pump prices. When they do, they make extra profit from gasoline that is already in their tanks - gas they paid less for. Then, when wholesale gas prices rise, the higher price lets them buy new gas to put in the tanks.

When oil prices go down, station owners don't immediately lower their prices at the pump. Instead they keep them higher until they buy fresh gasoline to fill the tanks at a lower price. Then, and only then, do they lower the pump price, but not down to the earlier level. Customers don't remember what the price was two or three weeks ago, so they keep it raised as long as they can before dropping it to maintain their usual small profit.

It's a complicated game, though. It's easy to make a mistake and get caught with expensive gas in your tanks, but lower prices on the pump, since customers expect the price to go down as soon as they hear that oil prices have gone down. The time lag between a wholesale buy by the refinery and that gas getting to the stations is longer than you'd think.

There are fewer gas stations than there used to be, and usually not across the street from each other. Customers usually have no idea what different stations' prices are. Loyalty programs, too, keep people going to their usual station. So, the price at the pump really doesn't follow crude oil prices that closely. It's just a game.

Finally, gas stations would all shut down if they relied on fuel sales. Not enough profit there. They all depend now on sales in the convenience store for all profits. The entire retail gasoline and diesel economy is much different than it used to be.

It's a game. And again, it's all about the benjamins and stealing from the middle class.

and various taxes and fees. Probably some small royalty percentage as well. But in the end the companies extracting and refining THEIR fossil fuels can sell them to whoever they want (well, I guess they can't sell to Cuba, so there's some rare exceptions).

I recently also learned that despite being the biggest producer, we still IMPORT more crude than we EXPORT (albeit a lot of our imports come from Mexico, Canada, and Venezuela and not that much from the Middle East). That's because these sources produce petroleum that is more akin to the oil the US itself produced for it's first 100 years of production, which is now post-peak and it's production in permanent decline since circa 1970. It's been more than offset volume-wise over the past 15 years or so by fracking, but the US lacks adequate refining for the type of oil that the frackers are producing, so that crude is mostly exported to countries with the right refineries for it (China, India, Netherlands, to name a few).

If world oil prices jump, then finished product costs in the US are going to jump as well. The profits, however, go straight into the pockets of the companies producing the oil and there's no means by which the government can control what we all pay at the pumps. Even opening the reserves only does so much, esp. when there's no actual end in sight to the supply shock. They're going to release the reserves slowly under these conditions.

In fact I looked up the numbers: 172M barrels over 120 days, which means it replaces about 21% of the petroleum the US imports per day, but that amount is only about 7-8% of total daily US consumption. On top of that, at *most* the strategic reserve gives US refiners a 5% discount vs. prevailing global prices. ALSO the companies don't HAVE to pass all of that along to consumers. The government controlling that would be socialist, doncha know

So that means refiners have a chance to replace up to about 21% of their feedstock with oil they bought from the reserve at up to a 5% discount vs if they'd bought it on the open market. So taken as a whole an SPR release of that size saves the refiners about 1% of total feedstock costs, with no obligation to pass it along to US consumers. The amount of 'easing' of prices at the pump is going to be extremely limited under these conditions. The US consumer is at the mercy of global crude prices even with SPR releases.

for the elite whom they claim to hate.