One War, Two Ledgers: The Profit Column and the Bill Column

The Profit

Column and the Bill Column A war produces two sets of books. One records what the companies selling energy earn; the other records what the households buying it pay. Since February 28, when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, both books have been open at the same time. In 2026 it has acquired a new line item, and the line item has a cause with a date: February 28, when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran. Six months on, the columns can be read side by side, and they tell very different stories. On one side, an estimate covering 51 large American oil and gas companies puts their combined profits for April through September at more than $130bn. On the other, Americans have spent an extra $150bn on petrol and diesel since the war began. The first figure is a conservative evaluation, assembled by The New York Times from the reported performance of those 51 firms. The second comes from an analysis by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab. Both describe the same war. Neither describes the same experience of it.

The comparison with the year before is what makes the first number legible. In the same April-to-September window of 2025, before the war and with oil cheaper, those 51 companies collectively earned less than $47bn. The gap between the two periods is roughly $83bn, and it did not arrive evenly across the industry. ExxonMobil and Chevron, the two largest American oil companies, reported quarterly profits of between $10bn and $15bn. ExxonMobil’s earnings doubled year on year; Chevron’s rose 180 percent. BP, another large oil company, reported its profits reached an 18-year high. The boom is still not a record: the same firms generally did better in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed oil to roughly $100 a barrel. This time the average was about $90 from April through September. The profit came less from the price of the raw barrel than from what could be done with it.

The refining side of the industry is where the war’s arithmetic shows most clearly. Valero Energy’s third-quarter profit rose more than sixfold, to $6.83bn. Phillips 66 booked the highest quarterly profit in its history: net income of $5.62bn, against $133m a year earlier. A refiner does not need crude oil to be scarce; it needs the gap between crude oil and finished fuel to be wide. That gap widens when someone else’s refinery stops working. Damage to refineries in the Middle East and Russia, disruption to shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and sanctions-related trade frictions all tightened supplies of diesel and other fuels. The resulting gap between what a refiner pays for crude oil and what it gets for the fuel it sells was captured by the plants still running. Many of those plants sit far from the missiles, and some of them had access to discounted crude.

The other column is measured per household. The $150bn spent on petrol and diesel since February 28 works out at more than $1,150 per household. A separate estimate by congressional Democrats puts the median household’s additional fuel bill at $856. What the national average confirms is the level. Gasoline averaged $4.12 a gallon in the third quarter of 2026, 96 cents above a year earlier and the highest quarterly price on record. That is a cost paid in small increments, a few dollars at a time, several times a month. It is also, added up across a country, the revenue line of the other column.

Where the Margin Actually Comes From

Geoffrey Miller, a geopolitical analyst and editor of the Gulf States Insights newsletter, calls the war the largest supply-side shock to global oil and refined products markets in years. The distinction matters: a supply shock means the physical ability to deliver has been reduced, not merely that buyers expect it to be. His second point is about geography. The war created a risk premium, an extra return investors demand for holding assets that could be disrupted, and US-based operators are structurally well placed to monetise it. “Structurally” is the operative word here. The advantage does not rest on skill or foresight; it rests on where the steel sits. Collecting that premium requires being the owner who is not disrupted.

Naser al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Institute for International Political Studies in Milan, splits the gain into two mechanisms. Producers of crude oil benefit from higher oil prices, while refiners capture exceptional margins as diesel and other fuel supplies tighten. Against that, US facilities were relatively secure and had access to discounted crude. Security is not usually a line in a refinery’s quarterly report. In 2026 it was part of the explanation.

The Gulf producers did not get the same deal, and the reason is physical rather than financial. Iran retaliated against the US-Israeli attack with missiles and drones aimed at the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, an independent conflict monitor, has counted at least 172 attacks on nonmilitary infrastructure across those six states. Iranian officials described their targets as US military facilities; energy infrastructure was hit as well. Iran then effectively blocked most vessels from passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The US answered with a naval blockade on Iranian oil and gas. Each move raised the cost and the risk of moving energy out of the same narrow passageway. Miller’s summary is blunt: Gulf producers were “hit hard by both higher costs and risks, along with physical damage, which makes their ability to benefit from the higher prices much more difficult”. [2]

One War, Two Ledgers: The Profit Column and the Bill Column (Image 1)

A second front has opened on the same logic. Fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis has turned the Bab al-Mandeb strait into a theatre of war. That strait connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, and Saudi Arabia uses it to export oil. Two narrow waterways that most of a region’s exports must pass through, not one, are now part of the same conflict. Prices moved on the difference between settlement and breakdown. They fell briefly in the summer after a memorandum of understanding was signed in June, then rose again when talks broke down. A memorandum is not a settlement, and the market treated it accordingly.

The Bill Arrives at the Kitchen Table

Energy is the first bill to move and the last to stop moving. The war has raised costs for oil, transport fuels, gas, electricity and food. The World Bank’s latest Commodity Markets Outlook has commodity prices rising 23 percent this year, with disrupted grain shipments and the El Nino weather phenomenon also threatening harvests and food affordability. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported on October 2 that world food commodity prices rose a further 1.5 percent in September. That followed August, when the index reached its highest level since late 2022. Adverse weather and trade disruptions in the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz both fed the reading.

The political response has been to relabel a private gain as a national one, and the record of that relabelling is on the public record. In March, a month into the war, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” [2] At a campaign event in Georgia on October 24 he widened the claim: “Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East, because they’re coming to Texas, and they’re coming to Oklahoma, and they’re coming to Louisiana and they’re taking that oil.” Then, without hedging: “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it—we’re making a freaking fortune.” The argument has a foreign-policy corollary. Trump has blamed high global fuel prices on Democrats and on Ukraine. He has pressed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to halt strikes on Russian refineries, even as Moscow continued to wage attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. His stated route to cheaper diesel is a deal with Russia that would reverse years of sanctions.

Democratic Representative Jim McGovern answered on X with a one-line inversion: “We’re not making a ‘freaking fortune,’ we’re PAYING a ‘freaking fortune.’” [2] The difference between the two sentences is the word “we”. In the first, it is a national aggregate that contains ExxonMobil. In the second, it is a household that contains a driver. The distributional question also has a personal dimension. A report this week from congressional Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee put the growth in Trump’s own holdings of oil and gas stocks at as much as $35.8m this year. That figure sits beside the $856 median fuel bill, and the two are read together.

None of this is settled by the next quarterly report. Florence Schmit, senior energy strategist at Rabobank’s global economics and markets team in London, considers it likely that prices will stay high while the duration of the war remains uncertain. In her reading, every market exposed to the global supply shock — the US included — will face high prices next year, and consumers will keep feeling that pressure unless governments step in. Miller’s caveat runs in the opposite direction in time. Unusually large gains from a sudden outside event rather than from the company’s own work strengthen balance sheets and shareholder returns in the short term. Over the longer term, high oil prices risk harming economic growth, could contribute towards a recession, and would then likely cut oil demand and accelerate the shift to renewable energy. al-Tamimi’s version is regional: Gulf producers face years of reconstruction and pressure to diversify export routes, a diplomatic settlement could ease prices, and renewed US-Israeli attacks on Iran risk another regional war, further disruption at Hormuz and longer shortages. The nozzle on the forecourt is the same object it was in January — same steel, same rubber seal, same shape in the hand. What has changed is the figure it dispenses at $4.12 a gallon, and who has already booked the difference: the 51 companies on one side of the ledger, the households on the other.

Sources

DOI: 10.1001/jamahealthforum.2026.0414

One War, Two Ledgers: The Profit Column and the Bill Column (Image 2)

Aljazeera — Quote source (original article)