Shell posted nearly $10 billion in second-quarter results as consumers struggled with higher living costs and the U.K. suffered a deadly heatwave, Jake Johnson reports.
Shell station in Canada. (Raysonho/Wikimedia Commons / CC0)
The London-based oil behemoth Shell has reported its net profit more than doubled in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2025 as the Iran war pushed up energy prices, causing pain for consumers in the United Kingdom and around the world.
Oxfam projected earlier this week that the world’s six largest fossil fuel corporations — Shell among them — would double their combined profit in the second quarter of 2026.
[ExxonMobil and Chevron also reported hefty quarterly earnings this week.]
The humanitarian group also found that “the emissions from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies were sufficient to cause around one in four heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023 — heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.”
“These profits have been built on an energy crisis that’s left households across the country struggling with high energy bills at home and expensive fuel at the pumps,” Danny Gross, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth U.K., said in a statement. “This underlines the urgent need to end our dependence on costly oil and gas.”
From April to June, Shell posted $9.84 billion in profit — the company’s best quarter in four years. Wael Sawan, Shell’s CEO, said the company’s “operational performance enabled very strong results during another quarter of severe disruption in global energy markets, as we worked hard to provide critical energy supplies and products to our customers.”
Shell said Thursday it would reward shareholders with another $3 billion in stock buybacks following the second-quarter results, which were released as the U.K. faced a deadly heatwave. U.K. authorities said this week there were 2,877 heat-associated deaths in May and June — putting the country on track to see its highest level of heat-related deaths on record.
“This is obscene,” Zack Polanski, leader of the U.K. Green Party, wrote on social media in response to Shell’s earnings report.
“While the cost of living crisis continues to spiral, with food and fuel prices soaring,” Polanski wrote, “so do global oil and gas companies profits.”
Rudy Schulkind, political campaigner with Greenpeace U.K., said that “we’re running out of words to describe the obscenity of these numbers.”
An analysis released last month by the environmental group 350.org estimated that over $700 billion “will be siphoned from businesses and households to the oil and gas industry” by the end of the year due to price increases caused by the war that the U.S. and Israel launched in late February.
Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Fund Drive!
Big money for the few.
Everyone and everything has to bow to it, they claim.
Hooray for “our” side?
Just imagine what the cost of gas will be for us working Americans if (when?) the Washington-Zionist-militarists decide to carry out a massive bombing of Iranian civilian power and energy infrastructure. The psychopathogicals in occupied Palestine want exactly this!
Iran will immediately respond by turning the Gulf satrapies into what they were in the 19th century, backwards empty deserts. The Strait of Hormuz will be closed off to all commercial traffic except for friendly Chinese, Russian and like vessels. The courageous Ansar Allah will shut down the Bab al-Mandab Strait further squeezing global energy supplies.
As I stated, a large segment of the Israeli population desires all of this.
According to OilPrice.com: “Chevron reported record net [second-quarter] income of $12.2 billion, nearly five times its year-ago profit. Exxon earned $14.5 billion, double what it made during the same quarter last year and its best result since oil prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Trump — who seems to assume that fossil fuel pricing, which is driven by supply and demand of physical commodities, works like real estate pricing, which depends on the price of credit — is raging that gasoline be priced at $2.25/gallon, as it was last during the pandemic, when few people were on the road.
Here is the link: hxxps://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Exxon-and-Chevrons-265-Billion-Quarter-Draws-Trumps-Ire.html
I forget to put “[sic]” after the word “invasion” in my comment above.
And they’re just the profits they tell us about.
The US had a windfall profits tax under Carter as OPEC prices increased world inflation but Reagan ended that real quick. Was there a deal for oil countries to buy into the US stock market instead. So they get to double the value now and get permanent war profits too.