Fuel prices: Record profit for TotalEnergies, the government asks it to be “exemplary”

TotalEnergies' record profits for this third quarter have not stopped getting people talking, including envious people. The French giant has indeed posted a record net profit of $8.3 billion thanks to the surge in hydrocarbon prices, from which its international competitors also benefit. The multinational more than doubled its net profit over one year, which reached $3.7 billion in the third quarter of 2025.

It also greatly exceeds its exceptional results for the first two quarters of 2026, which already reflected the surge in hydrocarbon prices since the start of the conflict in the Middle East, leading associations and political parties to call for taxing “superprofits”. Oil and now, gas too Like the European oil companies Shell and Repsol, which also announced their results on Thursday, TotalEnergies was driven between July and September by a historic performance in its Refining-Chemicals activity, at 3.5 billion dollars, compared to 687 million a year earlier. The Spanish Repsol also posted a quadrupled net profit over the first nine months of the year, more than half of which was achieved in the 3rd quarter alone.

Same story with the British giant Shell, which announced an increase in its net profit equivalent to that of TotalEnergies (+ 126.6% over one year), to $12.1 billion. And this upward trend in profits is expected to strengthen further with the increase in gas prices. European gas having exceeded 100 euros per megawatt hour this Wednesday for the first time in four years, a consequence of difficulties in transiting LNG cargoes from the Middle East and lower European stocks than last year at the same period.

TotalEnergies is also achieving very good results in its Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) branch, with a doubling of its adjusted net operating profit over one year, thanks to the increase in LNG sales prices and the “outperformance of trading activities”, according to its press release. On the production side, it’s a little less good. The group's oil and gas production, an important indicator, is in fact down slightly year-on-year (-1%).

It would be up “more than 4% over one year” excluding the impact of the conflict in the Middle East, indicates the group. Bring down the price at the pump The government welcomed these results this Thursday, recalling “the chance to have a major oil major in a crisis such as the one we are going through, in particular to remedy supply risks”, according to the Minister of Energy and government spokesperson Maud Bregeon this Thursday morning on BFMTV/RMC. “It would be wrong to sink into total bashing,” declared the minister.

Machine-translated from French