It will slowly go up as long as they are making more profit each month. There is a certain price that it will reach where it will hurt the oil companies profit. For example: Lets say they sell 1 million gallons a day (nice round # for this example), and we pay $3 a gallon. Thats $3 million total sales.

Next week its $4 a gallon, some people conserve, and they sell only 900,000 gallons a day. They now have 3.6 million in sales, and have saved money not transporting the other 100,000 gallons. But if it was $10 a gallon, and they only sold 200,000 gallons they've only made 2 million in sales.

Obviously the #'s are much larger in real life, but the point is they are going to test the market to make the highest profit (especially if they can sell less oil while doing it). If we can still afford gas, and consume close to what we were before then they would be stupid to cut the price. So it all depends on us, and how much we are willing to consume/pay. They are searching for that fine line of maximized profit. And that happens to be right between hurting, and absolutely not being able to afford it.