As it turns out, consumers aren't the only ones speculating about the high price of gas.

Oil speculators have been driving the market price for barrels of crude oil up, which in turn caused prices at the pump to jump to over $4 a gallon, said Mike Rud of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association

But it looks like relief is on the way, as legislators and industry leaders are teaming up to crack down on oil speculation.

Rud said that oil speculators artificially inflate the price of gasoline for their own profit.

Non-commercial traders, people not in the industry entering into the commodity market, purchase crude oil on the commodities market, but many only possess the oil on paper; they never take physical possession of the oil. They later sell the oil when the price rises and turn a profit without any of the costs associated with transporting and storing the oil.

"They take it on paper, they sit on it until the price is right and then they sell it."

Rud called it "gaming the market," and called the practice absurd.

As an example, Rud said at one point, a man purchased 46 million barrels of oil. To put that in perspective, Valero, the largest purchaser of oil on the open market, uses about 3 million barrels a day in all of its refineries, Rud said.

"When some guy, who is just a trader on Wall Street, has control of 46 million barrels of oil, someone needs to explain that to the American people," he said. "That's just wrong."

He said in a day non-commercial traders can trade up to eight times the daily amount of oil consumed in the U.S., and the result is artificially inflated oil prices.

However, recent attention from lawmakers and debate over energy policy may have spooked the speculators into selling, and the price per barrel of oil is down from its high of $147 to $118, though the drop in price also could be related to a drop in demand, as consumers begin conserving gas to save money.

But not everyone is sold on the speculators theory. Ron Ness of the North Dakota Petroleum council said he believes speculators aren't the sole cause of the rise in gasoline prices, but are just another part of the market, and that buying oil on the commodities market carries the same risk as buying stock. A risk that is not paying off right now.

"It'd be a bad time to be a speculator, people are going to be caught on both sides of (falling oil prices), just like any commodity or stock," he said.

Lynn Westfall, chief economist for Tesoro Corp., said he believes speculators raise the price of crude, which is the company's highest business cost.

During a press conference on Tuesday at the Mandan Tesoro refinery, Westfall joined Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., in support of a bill proposed by Dorgan that would require greater transparency in the oil commodities market and raise the required margins for purchase in an effort to bring the price of gas down by reining in speculators.

Westfall said with current margins, speculators need to invest only 5 or 10 cents on the dollar for every barrel of oil they purchase, which keeps their risk low.

In the press conference, Dorgan said the oil commodities market is now dominated by non-commercial traders. In 2000, the oil commodities market was 37 percent pure speculation and 63 percent legitimate hedgers, such as companies like Tesoro who use the market to keep prices stable. By 2008 the numbers had reversed, to 71 percent pure speculation, and 29 percent legitimate hedgers.

But those numbers are likely to change as the price continues to drop.

"With crude oil falling like this, speculators must be taking a beating," Ness said.

But Rud wants to see more done.

Along with higher margins, Rud would like to see position limits, so individuals can't purchase more oil than they can be reasonably expected to use.

"The bottom line is you got non-commercial traders in a market they ought not to be in," he said. "We have no intention of stopping until we get them out. We have no choice."