Several of the world's largest oil companies reported first-quarter earnings in recent weeks, giving investors new detail as to how sky-high gas prices are bolstering firms' bottom lines. Performance, in a word, was stellar. ExxonMobil
reported a net profit of $5.5 billion, more than doubling its earnings from the year-ago period. Shell
notched its strongest quarterly profit ever, and Chevron posted
its best earnings quarter in nearly a decade.
A new
analysis from the Center for American Progress examined five major oil companies — Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — as gas prices soar.
The authors of the Center for American Progress post wrote that, in the first quarter of 2022, these companies "brought in more than 300 percent more in profits than in the first quarter of 2021. That is a total of more than $35 billion in profits in just three months."
"In fact, these five companies' first-quarter profits alone are equivalent to almost 28 percent of what Americans spent to fill up their gas tanks in the same time period," the authors added.
The windfalls mark a seismic shift from how oil companies were performing at the start of the pandemic. The first wave of lockdowns saw demand for energy crater. Crude oil prices
even turned negative in the spring of 2020 as companies rushed to get unwanted oil off their hands.
The US is now experiencing what happens when the market swings in the opposite direction, and companies with pricing power are making a killing.