Oil majors double profits in Europe in latest quarter

Just eight oil companies[1] have made €7.5 billion in excess profits[2] in Europe in the first half of 2026, new T&E analysis shows. With oil prices shooting back up, T&E calls on the EU to tax excess profits on a permanent basis and use the revenues to reduce drivers’ exposure to volatile fossil fuels.

Six of the eight - BP, Shell, Eni, Orlen, Repsol and OMV - more than doubled their EU profits in the second quarter of this year compared to the same time last year off the back of volatility in the Middle East, while TotalEnergies and Moeve also made healthy profits. Because oil companies can shift profit across jurisdictions, T&E’s analysis ignores where profit is booked but instead uses companies' country-by-country reporting of revenues to allocate group-level profit to the EU27. Excess profits were highest in Poland, followed by Spain, Germany and France. As these excess profits stem from revenues earned within the EU27, they could be captured by a permanent windfall tax, if designed correctly, says T&E.

The eight companies earned around €17.9 billion in global excess profit over the first two quarters with the EU-attributed figure representing around 42% of that total. The largest of these companies, BP and Shell in particular, earn the majority of their revenue outside the EU.

Antony Froggatt, senior director at T&E, said: “Oil giants are abandoning green energy while drivers foot the bill for their record profits. As Europe burns, this is unjust. The EU must tax windfall oil profits and use the funds to make electric driving affordable for everyone. This needs to be the last oil crisis.”

Countries with higher rates of electric vehicles are much less exposed to higher prices. Denmark has a BEV share of around 19% compared to less than 1% for Poland. Previous T&E research found that the Iran conflict is set to hit petrol drivers five times more than EVs.

Polling carried out by YouGov on behalf of T&E and other NGOs found that the vast majority of Europeans support a tax on windfall profits.

Notes

[1] Because oil companies can shift profit across jurisdictions we do not rely on where profit is booked. T&E uses companies' Country-by-Country Reporting of revenues to allocate group-level profit to the EU27 and, where possible, to individual member states. This restricts the analysis to the eight companies that publicly publish sufficient geographic detail. The revenue proportions used derive from companies' most recent disclosures (FY2024 and FY2025) and are applied to 2026 profits. Whether the conflict altered the geographic distribution of revenue cannot be tested until FY2026 country-by-country reporting is published in 2027. The direction of any resulting bias is unclear and is discussed in the full briefing.

[2] "Excess profit" here has a deliberately narrow and testable definition: the year-on-year change in adjusted post-tax profit between a war quarter in 2026 and the same quarter in 2025. Comparing like quarters removes demand seasonality. It is simply the difference between what these companies earned during the war and what they earned in the same months a year earlier.

[3] T&E’s oil profits tracker is updated weekly.