Well, I'm not an "insider" but let me give you a guess at what is happening.

In most places, there is plenty of competition at the retail level. In all but the smallest of towns, you won't have all the gas stations owned by the same person or company. (They may all have the same distributor, but that's another matter.)

This tends to keep retail markups down, but as we all know there are still considerable variations in price. Because margins are so low, a five or ten cents increase in price can mean two or three times the profits. Such a station can do half or third the business and be just as profitable. (This ignores the fact that for many stations, the snack shop is the biggest profit center, hence they can tolerate low profits at the pump if they get people to come in.) So there are various strategies gas stations can use, either low margin/high volume or high margin/low volume.

This breaks down if there is an actual gas shortage in the area. If stations aren't getting enough gas to meet demand, the high volume/low price retailers will simply run out sooner than the low volume/high price ones. In this circumstance, a higher price does make economic sense because they will do just as much volume of business as the low price stations. The most profitable strategy is to increase price until you would just run out of gas as the tanker truck pulls up. So in areas that are having actual gas shortages, where some stations are out of gas, then we would expect to see higher margins at the retail level despite the existence of competition. Stations can't undercut their competitors and steal business because it just means they will run out of gas sooner and their profits will be less.

However, in most of the country this is not happening. Here in California I haven't seen any stations run out. But in areas impacted by the hurricane, or the temporary pipeline outages, where gas is actually running out, this effect probably played a role.

In the rest of the country, though, I would expect that the increases in prices are happening at higher levels, at the distributors and refineries. With fewer refiners in operation the distributors have to bid up the price of gas to get their supply, and the distributors then pass along their costs to retailers. Since the bottleneck is refinery operation, I would expect that that is where the high prices are originating, and that is where the excess profits would be collecting.

I'm not even clear what "gouging" really means. Do we mean simply 1) "making a larger profit than is typical for a business", or do we mean 2) "having excess market power and/or acting anti-competitively in order to make a larger profit than is typical for a business". Obviously the oil companies are starting to do 1), but that seems like an inevitable by-product of the situation in the market, not something unreasonable they are doing deliberately. I don't know about 2), but if there is any of that going on, the appropriate remedy is anti-trust law. And if we are going to stick it to the oil companies, how come we still haven't managed to do anything about Microsoft's outrageous margins (which are clearly due to 2).

It seems to me that the usage in the MSM of "gouging" is mainly 1), and it just reflects a lack of even the slightest economic knowlege.