BP made $3.2 billion in the first three months of 2026, which was more than double its profit from the same period last year. It did not achieve this by finding new oil or selling more of it. It did it by trading oil contracts. In other words: by betting on war. And your energy bill paid for it.
What is actually happening:In 2025, around 383 million oil trades were recorded in the UK, each covering roughly 1,000 barrels of oil at over $100 a barrel
The total value of those contracts runs into the tens of trillions of pounds, dwarfing the value of all UK share trading
The post-Ukraine energy price spike that devastated household budgets was not caused by a gas shortage; it was caused by financial speculation of this sort, and it is happening again
The futures – or option – price always declines, or rises, to the spot price at contract maturation. At which point his entire model collapses. Physical storage, hoarding, can indeed raise spot prices, but not futures.
Yeah, he’s confusing share market prices with commodity market prices. The former are pure opinions of a future. The latter firmly based in reality. Not being a zero sum game.
What relation is there between oil prices and energy bills? It’s all free from windmills isn’t it?
It’s those evil speculators again, does he mean a particular group of people perhaps?
Yes but high energy prices are government policy.
I may have mentioned that once or twice before.
BP trading makes money from volatility.
Downstream buyers, from refiners to airlines to even motorists, value certainty and are willing to pay a premium for it. i.e. a futures contract.
In uncertain times that premium rises.
Hence BP profits go up.
A lot of economics is just mechanical.
Also why BP still owns a lot of garages despite making little money on selling the fuel (most profit is made selling services and chocolate).
Owning a significant number of garages gives you a natural outlet for oil products after refining. The same used to be true of BP Chemicals which became Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS.
Murphy seems to think that we use oil to generate electricity. He is thirteen-and-a-bit uears out of date.
And, even if that had been the case, the extra cost of fuel oil when the oil price rose would be a tiny fraction of BP’s profits – the rise in crude prices feeds through immediately to the price of petrol but as fuel oil is the left-over from fractional distillation (a little-wanted by-product) it has a different supply/demand curve – which is why the refineries go in for more catalytic cracking when the crude oil and petrol prices go up..
Just out of interest, does anyone know how much more the government made from rising petrochemical prices?
“Man who is gleefully ignorant of how complex manmade systems such as hydrocarbon engineering and economies work has strong opinions on how those things should work.”
But enough about Ed Miliband and the rest of Parliament.
If so, well done BP…indirectly, many will benefit.
Commie dick Murphy is intellectually dishonest.
We are to project our decency on him and believe that had BP made $3.2 billion in the first three months of 2026 by finding new oil or selling more of it, the dick would have been just fine with that. The reality is that he hates private companies, and he also hates private companies making money. He doesn’t earn his oxygen.
Monitoring this as part of Energy Trading Risk used to be my job, known as Middle Office Mark-to-Market exposure management
Oil traders buy (or sell) the physical oil and then hedge the risk by purchasing an equal-and-opposite futures contract or over-the-counter paper swap trade. This locks in the price (since prices are equal-and-opposite) and essentially the profit.
It’s not perfect because there are operational price/risk differences between the physical and the paper, but it’s the difference between trading and pure speculation.
Not hedging the price means risking unlimited price exposure. That’s the sort of thing that can bring your company to it’s knees very quickly.
I’m continually amazed at the range of expertise on here and the enlightening comments that flow. Whereas Herr Kartoffel just has a pet echo chamber to massage his ego.
Okay, so this is obviously the usual nonsense. But as our favourite guest contributor is so fond of using ChatGPT, let’s see what his own analysis would have shown. This will help us see what he actually knew before making this post (its own emphasis):
[Then a longer explanation of how to suck eggs; then]
So… he knew it was a tissue of lies and then posted it anyway.
He really is a thick twat, isn’t he?