Oil company shareholders, who have suffered through the last couple of years, hit a gusher last week.

Markets bounced back from a rough few weeks with fury, as all the three major indices posted gains of nearly 4 percent. And energy stocks led the way, as crude oil surged 6 percent during the week ended Oct. 7.

California Resources Corp., a Chatsworth spinoff of recently departed Occidental Petroleum Corp., skyrocketed 56 percent to close at $4.06. Downtown L.A. oil company BreitBurn Energy Partners was runner-up, soaring 38 percent to close at $2.75. They were the two biggest gainers on the LABJ Stock Index. (See page 30.)

Richard Jones, a managing director at Merrill Lynch Private Banking and Investment Group in Century City, said BreitBurn and CRC rode a wave that carried most oil exploration and production companies, which were up more than 19 percent on the week.

While the surge lasted throughout the week, Jones said oil companies got an additional boost from an Oct. 6 announcement by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency estimated that September oil production fell by 120,000 barrels a day compared with August, and projected U.S. production of 8.9 million barrels a day for next year, down from the 9.2 million expected to ooze out of pumps this year. That helps companies like CRC and BreitBurn, which make most of their money selling oil. They have been hit by a more than yearlong swoon in the business as supplies have increased while demand has softened.

“Bringing down the supply a little bit gets the supply and demand closer to equilibrium,” Jones said.

Luana Siegfried, an oil industry analyst at Raymond James Financial Inc. in Houston, said CRC’s business in particular, being a pure exploration and production company, makes it especially sensitive to moves in the price of crude.

“Some stocks are more correlated with oil prices than others and CRC is correlated with oil prices,” she said.

Jones added that some of CRC’s’s boost was also likely due to the company’s recent 100 job cuts.

“For better or worse, the market tends to like it when, to put a positive spin on it, a company creates more efficiencies,” he said.

But Siegfried said the resurgent oil market mattered a lot more than those job cuts in increasing investor confidence in CRC.

“That will definitely help,” she said. “But I don’t think it saved the day.”