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Eni is a big Italian energy company that finds and sells oil and gas, and also makes and sells fuels, chemicals, and increasingly renewable power.
Eni is one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, and it does the whole chain: it searches for oil and gas underground, pumps it out, turns it into gasoline, diesel, and other fuels, and sells those through its network of gas stations. It also runs a big chemicals business that makes the basic building blocks for plastics and other products, and a growing renewable-energy arm that builds solar and wind farms. So it sells to everyone from a driver filling up at the pump to airlines buying jet fuel to factories buying petrochemicals.
The money mostly comes from selling oil and gas, and that makes Eni a creature of energy prices. When crude prices are high, the company gushes cash; when they crash, profits fall fast. Eni's job is to keep finding and producing hydrocarbons cheaply enough to make money even in bad years. It drills in places like Africa, the Middle East, and the North Sea, and it has a strong presence in natural gas, which it pipes and ships to Europe. That gas business has become more important since Europe scrambled to replace Russian supply after the war in Ukraine. Eni is controlled by the Italian state, which owns a stake through the economy ministry, though the company is publicly traded in Milan and on the New York Stock Exchange. Its main rivals are the other oil majors, especially European peers like Shell and BP, which face the same existential question: how to sell oil and gas today while paying for a lower-carbon future. Eni has spun off parts of its renewable business to raise money and has talked up a "satellite" model of separate listed units for different activities. It has also built a retail and lubricants arm that brings steadier cash than drilling.
The company spends heavily on dividends and share buybacks, which is how it returns oil money to shareholders rather than hoarding it. A crucial vulnerability is that its profits depend on decisions made by OPEC and global markets it cannot control, and critics argue its climate promises have not matched its continued spending on fossil fuels. In short, Eni is a cash machine built on hydrocarbons that is trying, slowly, to build a second act.
Saved answer 路 last researched 5 Nov 2026