BP's year-over-year bottom-line turnaround tops $22 billion, after posting $5.3 billion in earnings this year.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- BP reported $5.3 billion in second-quarter earnings Tuesday, marking a sharp turnaround from the staggering loss the oil company reported in the same period last year.
The London-based multinational energy company lost $17.2 billion in the second quarter of 2010 due to costs stemming from the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, the worst oil spill in U.S. history. That translates to a more than $22 billion turnaround year over year.
Oil prices have risen sharply this year and many oil companies have reported big gains in sales and profits.
For the first half of 2011, BP said it has earned $10.8 billion, compared with a loss of $11.3 billion in the first half of last year.
BP returned to profitability in the third quarter of last year, bouncing back from losses in the prior quarter, when the company took a pretax charge of $32 billion.
Looking ahead, BP expects the recovery to continue for the rest of the year and into 2012, with cash flowing in from new and existing operations around the world.
"We expect the momentum of our recovery to build into 2012 and 2013 as new projects come on stream," said BP chief executive Bob Dudley.
Dudley said the company is positioned to expand in "high-margin areas," including nine new projects expected to come on line over the next few years in Angola, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
BP, one of the largest non-government oil companies in the world, came under intense criticism for putting profits over safety after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April 2010, killing 11 people.
But the company has sought to put that and other deadly disasters behind it and repair its reputation.
"BP is a company that is changing rapidly," said Dudley. "Having stabilized the company while living up to our commitments in the U.S., we will now increase our focus on performance and long-term value creation."
BP said it completed the majority of its shoreline clean-up efforts in the second quarter. It said a total of $6.8 billion has been paid out to fund economic and environmental restoration in the Gulf region.
Also in the quarter, BP said it made two scheduled contributions totaling $2.5 billion to the trust fund set up last year at the government's behest to compensate victims of the spill. The fund paid out $1 billion in the second quarter to individuals and businesses, according to BP.
U.S. listed shares of BP (BP) were down over 2% ahead of the opening bell. The stock, which lost half its value at one point last year, is up about 6% so far in 2011.
BP said higher oil and gas prices underpinned its performance in the second quarter. But the company acknowledged that those gains were offset by a decline in production and higher costs.
BP said oil production fell 11% to 3.43 million barrels of oil or equivalent product, due largely to the federal moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. 
