Big Oil enjoyed a blockbuster profit windfall in the second quarter. A key question now is whether the industry will use this cash bonanza to reward shareholders, strengthen balance sheets or invest for the future — all while trying to avoid a growing political backlash.
The five supermajors, comprising Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and TotalEnergies, generated a whopping $48 billion profit in the April to June period, benefitting from higher fossil fuel prices amid hostilities between the U.S. and Iran.
They also raked in nearly $90 billion in cash generation over the same period, reflecting an all-time high — higher even than in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
The bumper earnings have drawn the ire of environmental campaigners, who have renewed calls for a windfall tax on the industry's excess profits, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump.
The U.S. president lashed out last week at U.S. oil majors Exxon and Chevron for making "too much money" off higher fuel prices amid the Iran war and reiterated his demand for lower prices at the pump.
"The supermajors enjoyed an unprecedented cash bonanza last quarter," Clark Williams-Derry, energy finance analyst at IEEFA, a non-profit organization, told CNBC by email.
But they didn't use this cash to "drill baby drill," Williams-Derry said, referring to Trump's policy to maximize energy production. He noted, for instance, that Big Oil's capital spending, dividends and buybacks remained stable.
"So, this raises a question: if they didn't give more money to shareholders, what did the supermajors do with the cash windfall?"
In the most part, IEEFA's Williams-Derry said oil companies have sought to stockpile cash reserves and pay down debt to improve their balance sheets. Indeed, the cash reserves of the world's five supermajors jumped by a little over $17 billion on a quarterly basis.
"The cynical way to describe the oil industry's financial playbook is: 'Pray for war.' The supermajors need periodic price spikes — such as the crises in Ukraine and Iran — just to shore up their finances," Williams-Derry said.
"For supermajors, intense consumer pain and global fuel shortages function as a financial antidote to the long stretches of low, stable prices that erode their finances. From the perspective of oil majors, price spikes are a feature, not a bug," he added.
Executives at the oil and gas majors told CNBC that they were looking to double down on areas of the business that they can control during the Middle East conflict, such as operational performance, trading and optimization.
"What BP is doing is making sure that we are focused on the things we can do to try to help address the situation. We're driving hard on reliability, both on our upstream assets where we produce those barrels and the refining assets where we refine them," BP CEO Meg O'Neill told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Aug. 4.
O'Neill said the company had made adjustments to how the firm's refining runs are set up to maximize the availability of products consumers most need at any point in time, citing jet fuel and diesel as an example.
Shell CEO Wael Sawan, meanwhile, described volatility as "the new normal" and said the macro is such that higher commodity prices had provided a very strong tailwind for its results.