The billions in profits big oil is reaping due to the Iran war may stymie the energy transition, experts and advocates fear, incentivizing oil and gas expansion and boosting the sector’s funds for political lobbying.

“Windfall profits from Trump’s war will allow big oil to build a wall of money around its Trump-era political victories,” said Lukas Shankar-Ross, a deputy director at the green group Friends of the Earth.

The deadly conflict in Iran has created a historic energy shock due to attacks on fossil fuel facilities and the blockage of the crucial strait of Hormuz trade route. Amid the chaos, energy prices – and oil companies’ earnings – have soared.

ConocoPhillips last week reported $2.3bn in profits for the first three months of 2026, up 84% from before the war began. Meanwhile, the top petroleum refiner Valero Energy announced quarterly profits of $1.2bn, beating estimates. Liberty Energy, founded and formerly run by Donald Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, saw quarterly earnings of $10m, up 32% from before the war began. BP, meanwhile, said it had seen “exceptional” performance, more than doubling its profits during the year’s first quarter, while Shell on Thursday also reported its first-quarter profits were stronger than expected.

The oil majors Chevron and ExxonMobil both saw their profits drop during the first three months of 2026, executives reported in earnings calls. Yet in short order, that trajectory will shift, analysts say. Consensus estimates shows ExxonMobil’s second-quarter earnings will more than double from a year ago, while Chevron profits are expected to increase by 56% for the year.

As oil companies rake in billions, Americans are suffering at the pump. On Wednesday, the US average price of gasoline soared to $4.52 per gallon, the highest price since July 2022.

“The reason why oil companies are doing so well right now, or at least are projected to do very well in the near term, is exactly because Americans are hurting,” said Kelly Mitchell, executive director of Fieldnotes, a watchdog organization tracking the oil and gas industry. “Their business interest is to extract as many dollars out of a barrel of oil as possible, and the folks on the other side of the equation are Americans who are just trying to fill up their gas tank and get to work.”

Trump has dismissed concerns about gas prices, telling reporters this week the spike is a “very small price to pay”. Since entering office, his administration has also made it clear that they are prioritizing the industry – which poured record donations into his campaign – over the American people, said Sean Casten, a Democratic representative from Illinois. For instance, Trump ended a Biden-era ban on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, which has put “upward pressure on US gas prices”.

“If you are a US oil producer, you are really happy right now, and if you’re a US oil consumer, you’re really not,” said Casten, who in March unveiled a legislative package aimed at lowering energy bills by prioritizing affordable renewable energy and modernizing the grid. “There are a lot more oil consumers than producers in the United States, and this White House seems to be ignoring the overwhelming majority of Americans.”

Fuel price spikes could end up being a “huge boost to the oil industry’s political efforts”, said Mitchell. The windfall earnings come as the sector has achieved major policy wins.

Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act alone, said Shankar-Ross, represents “the biggest expansion of fossil fuel subsidies in a generation”.

“Reversing this damage doesn’t get easier if the industry being subsidized is flush with cash,” he said.

It’s a concern that Isabella Weber and Gregor Semieniuk, economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, raised in the wake of the last major fuel shock, resulting from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Cashflows are up, so there’s more money to go around, including for lobbying,” said Semieniuk. “In the US, there’s also the narrative that the US is lucky to have its own fossil fuel supply right now [to serve as a backstop to supply shortages]. So they are helped by the ability to capitalize on being the saviors of the moment.”

During the Russia-Ukraine fuel shock, the US oil industry ramped up its political lobbying, using the war to demand more oil and gas leasing and arguing that more domestic production was needed for energy security. Oil majors also scaled back their climate plans as profit opportunities in fossil fuels grew. And high profit margins also “encourage capital to go into an industry”, said Weber.

“That is exactly the opposite of what we want from the perspective of climate change mitigation, as it strengthens the fossil fuel industry as a political constituency,” she said.

There were countervailing trends at work, said Weber. Renewables have become even more economically competitive than they were in 2022, and in March, the US for the first time generated more of its electricity from renewables than gas over the course of a full month. Meanwhile, high gasoline prices are undermining Trump’s popularity, potentially paving the way for a pro-environment president to take his place in 2029, said Weber.

“We may not see the very same trends we saw during the last shock,” she said. “But is this a big boost to big oil? Of course, absolutely.”