Shell reported adjusted profits of $6.92 billion for the first quarter of 2025, beating analyst forecasts of $6.36 billion by a significant margin and coming in almost 25% higher than the same period last year. The outperformance was driven largely by Shell’s trading division, which capitalised on the price swings and supply disruptions triggered by the Middle East conflict.
The result follows a similarly strong performance from BP, which last week described its trading quarter as “exceptional”. When two of the world’s largest energy companies independently flag their trading desks as the standout story of the same quarter, it says something clear about where the money moved during the Iran war’s early months. Traders benefit from volatility because sharp price movements widen the gap between what buyers will pay and what sellers will accept, create arbitrage opportunities across different markets and delivery points, and drive hedging demand from exposed businesses — airlines, utilities, and refineries among them — that need to protect themselves from further price swings.
A Strong Quarter and a $16 Billion Bet
The profit result arrives a month after Shell announced its largest acquisition in a decade — a $16.4 billion deal to buy Canadian shale producer ARC Resources. The timing is notable. Shell is locking in a major expansion of its North American production capacity at a moment when Canadian oil has become significantly more attractive to global buyers, precisely because it sits outside the supply disruptions affecting the Middle East.
When Chaos Is a Business Model
There is something worth sitting with here. The same conflict that has pushed airlines into emergency mode, forced India to burn through $20 billion in foreign exchange reserves, and left European fuel supplies on a four-to-six-week countdown has, for Shell’s and BP’s trading desks, produced some of the best quarterly numbers in recent memory. Energy trading exists precisely to intermediate between supply disruption and end demand, and someone has to absorb and redistribute that risk. But it is a reminder that in commodity markets, volatility is never uniformly painful. It redistributes wealth as much as it destroys it.
The ARC Resources acquisition suggests Shell’s leadership believes the current environment is not a short-term spike but a longer repositioning of global energy flows. Buying Canadian shale at scale, right now, is a directional bet on that thesis. If they are right, this quarter’s trading profits may look modest compared to what the asset base they are building will generate over the next decade.
