Next time you fill your gas tank, the price will likely be inflated by a few pennies per gallon because the sightless sheriffs at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, have ignored a return of the 19th century price-gouging techniques made infamous by John D. Rockefeller.

Unless FERC acts, everyone soon will have their pockets picked as pipeline charges are illegally jacked up, by as much as 500 percent, or about 25 cents per gallon, FERC records show.

In this case, the price gouging is by pipeline shippers with rights to transport refined petroleum. They resell those rights at a huge markup and get kickbacks.

The Supreme Court in 1959 reminded us that the Interstate Commerce Act makes it “unlawful for a common carrier to grant rebates to individual shippers by any device whatsoever or to discriminate in favor of any shipper directly or indirectly.” Illegal fees for transporting refined petroleum products in interstate commerce can result in criminal charges and up to two years behind bars upon conviction.

But instead of seeking civil damages and criminal prosecution, FERC is holding a one-day technical conference on Jan. 26 that may institutionalize price gouging rather than stop it.

This is yet another reason Congress needs to investigate FERC, which has a history of finding ways to suppress its duty to protect the public from price gouging in electricity prices as well as oil pipeline charges. FERC has also erected barriers to prevent complaints by consumers, the very public it is supposed to protect.

Congress requires FERC to make sure that only “just and reasonable” prices are charged for shipping oil and refined products like gasoline through the pipelines, whose prices, or rates, the agency is supposed to control. Because pipelines are legal monopolies, meaning there is no competitive market to ensure quality service and reasonable prices, FERC is supposed to protect consumers and regulate the monopolies. It does not.

The immediate issue involves Colonial Pipeline, the largest system for moving gasoline, jet fuel and other refined petroleum products. Charles and David Koch, Shell Oil, a subsidiary of the KKR private equity firm and two other enterprises own the system, which has more than 5,000 miles of pipe and serves 13 Eastern states.

The latest price gouging arises because the demand to move refined petroleum from Texas to the East Coast is outstripping the pipelines’ capacity. Some longtime users who have rights to ship through Colonial pipes have been reselling their rights for huge markups, which they then pocket.

In reselling capacity, these shippers have made themselves common carriers under the law Congress enacted in 1887 to stop the abuse of customers by Rockefeller and others. Rockefeller was so greedy that he demanded and got kickbacks from railroads not just on the oil he shipped but also on the oil his competitors shipped.

It is a federal crime to ship oil through a multistate pipeline without a FERC-approved price chart, known as a tariff, notes Elisabeth Myers, a veteran pipeline lawyer and an adjunct associate professor of law at American University College of Law in Washington, D.C., in a forthcoming white paper.