Two weeks into the US-Israel war with Iran, the White House was fielding heavy criticism that the conflict would drive up gas prices and frustrate voters. Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to appease Americans about gas prices, which were slowly climbing toward $4 a gallon.
“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,” he wrote.
Now five weeks into the war, as Americans struggle with soaring gas prices and the threat of higher inflation, it is becoming clearer who is making “a lot of money”: defense contractors and oil companies.
The US defense department announced on Wednesday Boeing would join Lockheed Martin to help triple the US production of missile seekers, which boosted the aerospace manufacturer’s share price. Lockheed Martin, a key defense contractor with the US government, has seen its stock jump 25% since the start of the year.
Meanwhile, American-produced oil has shot up in value as Iran continues its blockade of the strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil and gas would typically pass through, and energy infrastructure in the Middle East remains vulnerable to attacks. US crude oil has nearly doubled since the start of the conflict, going from $65 a barrel to over $110 a barrel in a month. Gas prices at the pump have followed suit, rising past $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022.
a graph showing the price of fuel in the US
The increase has been a boon for American oil companies, whose share prices have soared since the start of the year. Even as the overall US stock market has dipped down, share prices of companies including ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron have all jumped by over 20% since the start of the year. US oil producers could be in for an additional $63bn in profit as oil has climbed past $100 a barrel, according to a report from the market research firm Rystad Energy.
“[Oil prices] in the month of March have been materially higher than any of these guys had expected. So certainly at this point in time, it’s been a windfall for the vast majority of US energy companies,” said Leo Mariani, a senior research analyst at Roth Capital Partners.
The last time oil companies got a boost from price shocks was in 2022, after Russia, a major oil producer, invaded Ukraine and uncertainty flooded energy markets. Average US gas prices hit $5 a gallon, the highest in history, while inflation would hit a generational high of 9%.
It was a painful time for Americans at the gas pump, but the uncertainty was a win for a select few. Across the globe, publicly listed oil and gas companies made $916bn that year, more than three times the profit in previous years. American companies alone made $281bn in those few months that oil prices had soared. In 2023, Chevron announced a huge stock buyback program worth $75bn – a seven-fold increase compared with the year prior – after company shares soared over 50% in 2022.
“Things didn’t cost more, things weren’t harder to bring to the market or anything like that, but suddenly the price was twice as high,” said Gregor Semieniuk, an assistant professor of public policy and economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “When the price is $50 [a barrel], the shale companies hardly make any profit. But when the price is $100 [a barrel], the profit differential multiplies.”
In research published in September, Semieniuk and fellow economist Isabella Weber found that 50% of the profits US oil companies reaped in 2022 were distributed to the top 1% of Americans. About 1% of the profits trickled down to Americans in the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution.
Economists say the gains from the current oil price shocks could actually be higher. Unlike in 2022, the conflict with Iran has damaged oil infrastructure in the Middle East. While American oil companies have investments in the Middle East’s energy infrastructure, “most of the bigger companies are very, very well diversified globally,” Mariani said.
“You’re benefiting a lot more from higher prices than you are from lost production,” he added.
Even if the conflict ends, it’s unclear how long it will take for the Middle East to produce oil at a pre-conflict capacity.
In 2022, “Russian oil was not really removed from the market, it was just kind of reshuffled,” said Clay Seagle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies energy and climate change program. “Now we’re dealing with a much more severe supply event because the oil has been actually removed from the market.”
Higher oil prices aren’t always a win for oil companies, Seagle said. Prolonged high prices could mean consumers, including businesses, start to make a concerted effort to lower their oil consumption. For example, the US moved away from using oil to power electricity after the oil price shocks of the 1970s, he noted.
But oil is in a much better spot than many of the other industries that rely on oil and gas to produce and ship their products. The price of diesel, a heavier type of oil that is used to power trucks and planes, has jumped 40%. The stock of some airline companies, including United and American Airlines, has dropped over 15% since the start of the year. The conflict has also disrupted the production of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is used to produce fertilizer that is key to the food supply.
“We’re approaching the kinds of levels of disruption that we saw in 2022, and with that, the kinds of profits that we saw there,” Semieniuk said. “If this takes longer, it’s going to surpass that.”
