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The London-based oil behemoth Shell reported Thursday that 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.
“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 UK, 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 it would reward shareholders with another $3 billion in stock buybacks following the second-quarter results, which were released as the UK faced a deadly heatwave. UK authorities said Thursday that 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 UK 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 UK, 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 US and Israel launched in late February.
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. 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.”
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