You can be sure of profits as John Healy the new Chancellor of the Exchequer has said the government is standing by to prevent the public from “being taken for a ride at the pump or the till” as the Iran war continues to hit prices The Guardian reports.
While he said there had been “no significant evidence of so-called price gouging” during the crisis, Healy used a weekend column to tell the big retailers that ministers were “watching closely” for any signs of profiteering.
On the matter of profits (perhaps unnoticed by The Chancellor as yet?) BP announced that theirs have surged to their highest level since 2022 after the war in the Middle East pushed up oil prices. They reported a profit of $5.73bn (£4.26bn) between April and June. That was more than double the $2.35bn made a year earlier and the highest quarterly profit since 2022 when the Russia-Ukraine war began, as reported by the BBC.
We are, of course, only too aware that the price of crude oil has jumped since the outbreak of the Iran war on 28 February when the United States and Israel launched joint military strikes against Iran. This resulted in major disruption to global supplies of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz.
As previously reported BP, which employs 14,000 people in the UK, plans to movefurther away from clean energy, selling off its US renewable natural gas business Archaea. Recently, BP also announced it was putting its North Sea business up forsale in a move that would end their 60 years of production in the area.
Readers may recall that BP was once in public ownership but the Thatcher government sold its last stake in 1987. The company, then called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was effectively nationalised by the British government in 1914 when it purchased a 51% controlling stake. Its assets were later nationalised by Iran in 1951,and its Libyan operations were nationalised in 1971. The Thatcher government fully privatised its remaining holdings in stages between 1979 and 1987.
Meanwhile not to be left out, Shell’s profits for the second quarter of the year have more than doubled after the Iran war pushed up oil prices. On 30 July they postedprofits of $9.84bn (£7.37bn) for the April-to-June period, up from $4.26bn at the same point last year.
But energy prices have also seen sharp swings during the conflict, which has boosted Shell’s trading business. Commenting Friends of the Earth energy campaigner Danny Gross said “with extreme heatwaves and wildfires hitting the UK and ravaging Europe, it’s outrageous that Shell is making huge profits while continuing to fuel the climate crisis” and went on to say “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. This underlines the urgent need to end our dependence on costly oil and gas.” He added that: “Andy Burnham must reject the climate-harming Rosebank oil project, which Shell co-owns. Instead, he should strengthen the windfall tax on gas and oil companies and use the proceeds to speed up the transition to a cleaner, cheaper energy system that boosts energy security and protects both the planet and people’s pockets.”