The war in Iran is only ten days old, yet we can already see the impact it is having on the energy sector. Crude oil prices jumped 20 percent in the immediate aftermath of the attack, which should expand profit margins for oil producers operating outside the blast zone in the Middle East.

For the same reason, midstream companies that provide transportation and storage services for crude oil and natural gas should also benefit. Less petroleum coming out of the Middle East should drive up demand for those services in the United States and Canada since both countries are net exporters of petroleum.

To that end, below are two companies that are already seeing their share prices rise due to the war in Iran. They both operate in North America and have highly leveraged balance sheets that can turn small price increases into big profits.

APA Corp.

You may have never heard of oil and natural gas producer APA Corp. (NSDQ: APA), in part because it is relatively small ($11 billion market cap) and has no retail presence. It is strictly a wholesale operation, with refineries and petrochemical plants its biggest customers. The company was founded in 1954 and is headquartered in Houston with operations in the United States, the North Sea, and Egypt.

On February 25, two days before the attack on Iran began, APA released its fiscal 2025 Q4 and full year results. Those numbers were good, but under normal conditions would not have gotten much notice on Wall Street.

However, conditions are anything but normal in the global energy markets right now, so APA is getting more attention than usual. After closing below $28 the day it released those results two weeks ago, APA rose above $32 early last week as shown in the chart below.

At that share price, APA is valued at roughly 8 times trailing earnings which is roughly half the average multiple for its peer group. That is largely due to the company’s decision to sell some of its underperforming assets last year to improve its per share operating metrics and free up capital to invest in more promising development projects.

The timing of those moves may turn out to be perfect. Demand for oil and natural gas coming out the Permian Basin in Texas should escalate as the war on Iran drags on, which is where APA has been concentrating its development capital.

There isn’t much more to this story than simple math. At the same time APA has restructured its balance sheet to leverage its investment in the Permian Basin, higher oil prices should allow the company to accelerate the timeline for bringing those assets online.

Enterprise Products Partners

To a lesser degree, energy midstream operators should also benefit from increased demand for domestic sources of crude oil and natural gas. That is good news for Enterprise Products Partners (NYSE: EPD), which controls more than 50,000 miles of pipeline, 21 deepwater docks, 45 natural gas processing trains, 27 fractionators, and over 300 million barrels (MMBbls) of natural gas liquids (NGL) storage.

Like APA, Enterprise Products Partners is headquartered in Houston and has a strong presence in the Permian Basin. Over the past five years, its NGL volume coming out of the Permian Basin has nearly doubled. That’s important since 55 percent of the company’s $10 billion in total segment gross operating margin consisted of NGLs last year, with crude oil (15 percent), refined products (14 percent), and natural gas (16 percent) accounted for the remainder.

When the company released its fiscal 2025 Q4 and full year results on February 3, it reported a slight drop in net income attributable to common shareholders compared to the previous year. However, that result was largely influenced by declining natural gas prices throughout most of 2025. Nevertheless, Wall Street liked what it saw and bid its share price up before hostilities commenced in Iran as illustrated below.

Higher oil prices almost always lead to higher natural gas prices if they remain in place long enough. It is too soon to say if the war on Iran will last long enough to have a lasting impact on natural gas prices, but the longer it goes on the more likely it is that Enterprice Products Partners will be able to raise prices and increase its profit margin this year.

To be sure, war is an awful way of settling disputes. Hopefully, nations will find other ways of reconciling their differences in the future that do not entail death and destruction. But until that day arrives, the hard truth is that some businesses will prosper from war while others do not.

Also read: “5 Energy Stocks to Watch as Geopolitical Tensions Rise“