Los bankslas oil companies and the weapons manufacturers. The three sectors make up the holy trinity that is making the most cash in these troubled times of war in europea war that has contributed decisively to spur the energy crisisthe inflationary spiral and the interest rates, closely related phenomena that help explain the stratospheric results obtained last year by the three sectors while the bulk of society was impoverished. only between six major oil companies private companies in the world, its profits will approach in 2022 the 200,000 million euros, a figure never seen before thanks to the effect of the ukrainian war in the gas and oil pricesas well as to demand rebound after the worst years of the pandemic.
the british BP It has been the last to make public its accounts from last year, settled with a brecord profit of 25.8 billion euros, more than double that in 2021. A luck that their competitors have shared. The also British Shell announced last week the best results in its 115 years of existence: won 37,000 million euros. The same as Exxon, the first hydrocarbons company in the United States and the second in capitalization in the world behind Saudi Aramco. Exxon pocketed a benefit of more than 52,000 million, 142% more than the previous year. “Clearly we have benefited from a favorable market,” his chief executive, Darren Woods, told investors.
stratospheric prices
In the case of Chevronthe benefit was around 34,000 million euros, while in the ConocoPhillips, also American, exceeded 16,000 million, the highest for the company in a decade. In the next few days the results of the French will be known TotalEnergieswhich completes the sextet of what English is called ‘Big Oil’a group in which some also include the Italian Eni. “The energy crisis derived from the war in Ukraine has resulted in stratospheric prices, especially gas, but also oil, which explains these results”, he assures this newspaper Carlos Torres Diazchief analyst for the gas and electricity markets at Norwegian consultancy Rystad.
European companies in particular have concentrated their business of late on the gasconsidered by the European Union as a “transition fuel” towards renewables, less polluting than oil. Both in production and export, particularly of the liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is transported in methane tankers and has become the main alternative to russian gas that came to Europa by pipeline. “And those gas prices, spurred by competition between European and Asian buyers, have come to be 10 times higher than normal”.
The war has had an unquestionable effect on prices, according to the Rystad analyst. “Prices began to rise in 2021 because Russia began to reduce supplies to Europe, but everything was exacerbated with the explosion on Nordstream 1 and the sanctions to punish the invasion,” says Torres Díaz. “All this has coincided with a lower production than expected in the French nuclear reactors and the hydroelectric plants on the continent due to the scarcity of water, which has contributed to increasing the prices of hydrocarbons.”
Taxes for “extraordinary profits”
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The obscene profits of the oil companies have renewed the voices in the US that call for taxing their “extraordinary benefits”a subject still pending despite the fact that Joe Biden has come to suggest it or the few taxes that the big oil companies pay in the country. In it United Kingdom yes they pay, after the conservative government of the former prime minister, Boris Johnson, put a 25% tax on those windfall profits. But he did so only to those derived from his oil and gas production in the North Sealittle less than small change for the business of its global companies.
The most worrying thing, in any case, is that given the current boom, some seem to be rethinking their commitments to reduce CO2 emissions. BP announced on Tuesday that it plans to take things more slowly than promised three years ago. Instead of reducing your fossil fuel production 40% by 2030, now promises to reduce it by only 25%. And all this while increasing its investment in hydrocarbon projects. It remains to be seen if others follow in his wake. “At the moment it is not a trend in the sector, at least in Europe,” says Mariano Marzo, a member of Repsol’s Board of Directors.