The outrage about oil company profits is not unusual. Politicians often criticize the energy industry for profiteering when gas prices surge, and then quietly drop their complaints when prices fall back. Over the last 15 years, oil and gas prices have moved up and down in three big cycles, the most recent one beginning with the coronavirus pandemic.

As vaccines became widely available and the early crush of the pandemic receded, energy demand quickly recovered. But global oil production has not completely returned to prepandemic levels. U.S. production is just shy of 12 million barrels a day, roughly a million short of the record set just before the pandemic. With oil companies adding rigs, the Energy Department expects U.S. production will surpass 13 million barrels next year.

Biden administration officials have urged oil companies to expand production faster, but Wall Street investors are telling them to be more cautious because they don’t want companies to drill up a storm when prices are high, only to suffer losses when prices sink again. That is what happened between 2011 and 2015, leading to scores of bankruptcies.

Right now, oil companies are making record profits. Exxon Mobil said this week that its profits in the first three months of the year could total $11 billion, the most the company has made in a quarter since 2008, when the price of a barrel of oil topped $140.

Exxon has cut spending and its work force in recent years, even while boosting production in the Permian basin straddling Texas and New Mexico and off the coast of Guyana. Darren Woods, the company’s chief executive and one of the witnesses at the Wednesday hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has insisted that Exxon is working to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions while meeting the country’s energy needs but that it is not responsible for rising prices.

Mr. Woods will be joined at the hearing by the chief executives of BP America, Chevron, Devon Energy, Pioneer Natural Resources and Shell USA. The committee will also hear from H.R. McMaster, who was a national security adviser to President Donald J. Trump and is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

“Because oil is a global commodity, Shell does not set or control the price of crude oil,” Gretchen H. Watkins, president of Shell USA, is set to tell the committee, according to prepared remarks released on Tuesday night. “Today’s crisis and the pressure on hydrocarbon supplies and prices reveal the urgent need to accelerate the energy transition.”

The debate over who is responsible for rising fuel prices is playing out beyond Capitol Hill. The League of Conservation Voters is displaying an art installation depicting a wall of oil barrels on the National Mall in Washington this week to highlight what it calls “the oil industry’s price gouging.”

Conservatives have countered that oil prices move in cycles and that after making record profits one year, companies often lose money in other years.

“If oil companies are engaging in price gouging now, it’s a mystery why they couldn’t do it when gas was $2.20 a gallon and they were losing money,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington.