U.S. refiners are expected to post higher profits for the third quarter as gasoline and diesel sales margins improved despite soaring crude oil costs, analysts said.

After more than a year of declining fuel demand, gasoline and distillate consumption is back at five-year averages in the United States, the world’s largest fuel consumer. This has increased the margins on refined products to more than double what these companies were doing at the same time a year ago.

The seven largest independent U.S. refining companies, including giants Marathon Petroleum (MPC.N) and Valero Energy (VLO.N) , are projected to post an average earnings-per-share gain of 66 cents, versus a loss of $1.32 for the third quarter of 2020, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

These gains are due to the 3-2-1 crack gap, an indicator of refining margins, which assumes that one barrel of crude oil is refined into three parts gasoline, two parts diesel and one part jet fuel. This spread is currently $ 21 a barrel, down from about $ 9 a year ago.

Energy demand recovered quickly from the worst days of the pandemic in 2020, and prices for Brent and U.S. crude oil have hit multi-year highs in recent days. But the demand for products also increased, which helped to increase the margins.

Product supplied – an indicator of demand for refined products in the United States – was 21.5 million barrels per day in the most recent week, slightly higher than the same period in 2019, before the start of the pandemic, according to the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).