Oil & Gas Giants Cash in Tens of Billions

On February 7, French energy company TotalEnergies announced an annual net profit of $21.4 billion for 2023, an even higher result than in the record-setting year prior. This increase by 4 percent year-on-year comes despite falling oil and gas prices after the Russia-Ukraine war sparked a price hike for oil and gas in 2022. As our chart shows, its financial performance helped TotalEnergies beat other major U.S. and European oil and gas companies.

The multinational overtook U.S.-based company Chevron with a slim margin of $20 million. Even though they couldn't replicate their record profits from 2022, ExxonMobil and Shell also raked in tens of billions of dollars while other parts of the global economy still reeled from a multitude of economic and political crises.

Even with profits this high, rivaling, for example, Amazon's net income in the same year, one other major player on the other side of the globe performed even better despite seeing similar drops in income. The state-owned company Saudi Aramco posted a net profit of around $33 billion in the third quarter of 2023 alone and will easily see its income shoot past the $100-billion mark again for the full year 2023.