Exxon Earnings: As Diesel Ran Short, Refining Became Its Top Earner for the First Time in at Least Five Years

By Stock Titan Editorial Team Published October 30, 2026, 06:50 AM EDT · Updated October 30, 2026, 07:25 AM EDT

Exxon earnings report for the third quarter of 2026

Adjusted earnings per share, the figure Exxon leads with, were $4.23 in its results release. The table below gives the standard figures beside the adjusted ones.

Exxon restated its 2025 adjusted figures when it began leaving out timing effects. On that basis the year-earlier quarter earned $7.9 billion, according to the supplement to its second-quarter results.

One-time items, mostly a gain on asset sales, came to plus $0.4 billion this quarter. The rest of the gap between the standard and adjusted figures is a timing effect. Exxon hedges cargoes with financial contracts valued at quarter-end prices, while the oil and fuel they cover count only when sold. Exxon says that gap reverses in later quarters, and it came to minus $2.5 billion.

The release also carried news beyond the quarter’s profit. Guyana and Kearl, an oil sands mine in Alberta, Canada, have each produced 1 billion barrels since output began. The PNG LNG gas export project in Papua New Guinea has produced 100 million tons. Exxon took over as operator of the Papua LNG project there. It agreed to raise its working interest, its ownership share, in LNG projects at Papua to 34% and at Rovuma in Mozambique to 50%, where it is already the operator. It also reported the startup of carbon capture and storage at a project with Nucor, and approval for its Rose carbon storage project. Carbon capture and storage traps carbon dioxide and stores it underground.

Exxon’s two smaller businesses moved apart. Chemicals earned less as margins declined, Exxon said, while specialty products earned more on higher margins for basestocks, the base oils that lubricants are made from.

Did Exxon earn more from refining or from oil and gas?

Exxon’s Energy Products segment, its refineries and fuel sales, earned $9.1 billion on the adjusted measure in the third quarter. Its Upstream segment, the oil and gas fields from Texas to Guyana, earned $7.3 billion. In each of the six quarters before on that measure, starting with the first quarter of 2025, the order was the other way round.

Show the data

Category	Oil and gas production	Refining and fuels
1Q25	$6.6B	$0.9B
2Q25	$5.3B	$1.4B
3Q25	$5.6B	$1.7B
4Q25	$4.4B	$2.6B
1Q26	$6.3B	$2.8B
2Q26	$9.2B	$4.1B
3Q26	$7.3B	$9.1B

Under standard accounting, refining also came out ahead, by just $81 million. On that basis oil and gas had out-earned refining in every quarter from mid-2021 to mid-2026. That held even at the height of the 2022 fuel crunch, when the fields made $12.4 billion in a quarter against $5.8 billion.

Show the data

Category	Oil and gas production	Refining and fuels	Note
3Q21	$4.0B	$0.5B
4Q21	$6.1B	$0.9B
1Q22	$4.5B	-$0.2B
2Q22	$11.4B	$5.3B
3Q22	$12.4B	$5.8B	2022 peak in refining earnings
4Q22	$8.2B	$4.1B
1Q23	$6.5B	$4.2B
2Q23	$4.6B	$2.3B
3Q23	$6.1B	$2.4B
4Q23	$4.1B	$3.2B
1Q24	$5.7B	$1.4B
2Q24	$7.1B	$0.9B
3Q24	$6.2B	$1.3B
4Q24	$6.5B	$0.4B
1Q25	$6.8B	$0.8B
2Q25	$5.4B	$1.4B
3Q25	$5.7B	$1.8B
4Q25	$3.5B	$3.4B
1Q26	$5.7B	-$1.3B
2Q26	$7.9B	$5.5B
3Q26	$7.1B	$7.2B	Third quarter 2026

Why did Exxon’s refining earnings jump?

In its list of market and planned effects filed on October 16, Exxon put the margin gain at $4.5 billion for Energy Products. Its own refining margin benchmark averaged $50.3 a barrel in the quarter, against $29.0 in the second quarter and $17.5 a year earlier. The benchmark tracks the gap between crude costs and fuel prices per barrel.

Exxon’s plants also ran hard. Its results release says its U.S. Gulf Coast refineries used 100% of their crude processing capacity in the quarter. Leaving out Middle East disruptions, its fuels plants worldwide ran at their highest rate for the first nine months of a year in internal records going back to 2014.

Show the data

Category	Value
3Q25	$17.5
4Q25	$18.3
1Q26	$16.3
2Q26	$29.0
3Q26	$50.3

Global output of distillate fuels, the family that includes diesel and heating oil, fell as refining slowed around the world, the U.S. Energy Information Administration wrote on October 7. Lower output raised international prices, and U.S. distillate stocks were low heading into winter, the agency said. The U.S. retail diesel price reached $6.53 a gallon in the week of September 21, the highest weekly reading since the Energy Information Administration’s series began in 1994. Independent refiners had the same quarter, as our article on Valero’s results shows. At Chevron, which reported the same morning, the downstream business, its refining and fuels arm, earned $4.9 billion under standard accounting. That was still behind $5.7 billion from oil and gas, as our article on Chevron’s results shows.

Added together, the effects on Exxon’s October list came to $2.4 billion more than its second-quarter adjusted earnings, and the actual result came in $0.4 billion above that sum. The chart below shows each step. Exxon said the list was not complete, was not an estimate of earnings and left out its operating performance. So the remainder holds whatever the list did not cover, including the gap between its early estimates and the final figures.

Show the data

Step	Value
Q2 2026	$14.7B
Prices	-$1.0B
Fuel margins	+$4.5B
Other margins	-$0.1B
Other listed	-$1.0B
Not listed	+$0.4B
Q3 2026	$17.5B

Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, made the case in the release that more than prices was at work. On the U.S. Gulf Coast, he said, investments such as the Beaumont refinery expansion had helped raise its output of distillates by about 40% since 2019. He said its investments, technology and cost savings had brought “lasting improvements” that went beyond favorable prices and margins.

Why Exxon’s oil and gas earnings changed

Exxon’s October filing put the effect of lower oil and liquids prices at minus $1.3 billion, with natural gas prices adding $0.3 billion. The supplement to its results shows Exxon got less for its U.S. crude than in the second quarter, as the table below shows. Against a year earlier, oil and gas earnings were still higher, up from $5.6 billion on the restated adjusted measure. Brent, the global crude benchmark, was also well above its level of a year earlier.

Production averaged 4.50 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, a measure that counts gas by its energy content, against about 4.8 million a year earlier. Exxon put the drop in oil and gas earnings from the second quarter down to lower prices and what it called an accelerated Guyana entitlement impact. That means a smaller share of Guyana’s output assigned to Exxon under its contract there. The volume table of its results supplement shows entitlement changes tied to prices, spending and other factors took away more output than growth added.

Exxon dividend, buybacks and debt

Exxon raised its quarterly dividend to $1.07 a share from $1.03, and said that makes 44 consecutive years of increases in its annual dividend per share. It raised the dividend with its third-quarter results in 2024 and 2025 as well, as its dividend history shows.

Over the first nine months of 2026, Exxon paid out about 72% of its free cash flow. That is more than in the third quarter alone, because the first quarter brought in only $2.7 billion.

The buybacks keep shrinking the share count. Exxon had 4,079 million shares outstanding at the end of the quarter, 3.3% fewer than the 4,217 million a year earlier. With these results it announced $20 billion of repurchases for 2027, assuming reasonable market conditions, the same as its plan for 2026.

Total debt stood at $34.3 billion against $12.2 billion of cash at the end of the quarter, according to the balance sheet in the results supplement. Exxon said it had cut its net debt by nearly $11 billion so far in 2026.

Show the data

Category	Dividends	Share repurchases
3Q25	$4.2B	$5.1B
4Q25	$4.4B	$5.1B
1Q26	$4.3B	$4.9B
2Q26	$4.3B	$5.1B
3Q26	$4.3B	$5.1B

Exxon’s longer record of earnings and payouts is on its financials page, and StockTitan’s dividend calculator models dividend income from a yield you enter.

Did Exxon change its spending plans?

Exxon set that range in its full-year 2025 results, along with a plan to repurchase $20 billion of its shares through 2026. Cash capital spending was $7.0 billion in the third quarter and $20.0 billion in the first nine months.

The longer plan Exxon laid out in December 2025 aims for 5.5 million barrels of oil equivalent a day by 2030. It names new LNG project startups in Papua New Guinea and Mozambique, where Exxon is raising its stakes, among its sources of growth. The Permian, Guyana and liquefied natural gas would make up about 65% of that output.

Refining’s lead, then, came from fuel. The quarter shows that refining can make up for weaker oil and gas earnings, while Exxon’s plan to 2030 still rests on producing more oil and gas.

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