OIL group Shell is making £1.5m an hour in profits, it confirmed yesterday.

Surging oil prices mean the global company almost topped its record 2004 profits haul in the space of nine months.

The company generated profits of £9.86bn between January and September - compared with £9.88bn in the whole of last year. This performance was also spurred by one-off gains on the sale of assets and came in spite of lost production and damage to rigs from the summer of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

Shell said yesterday that production in 2005 would be about 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, which is at the bottom end of its target laid out earlier this year.

The cost of repairing hurricane damage to rigs and refineries would be about £196.5m after tax, although Shell said much of this should be covered by insurance.

Quarterly profits of £4.13bn for Shell are higher than the £2.48bn reported by rival BP earlier this week. The figure for the third quarter includes an exceptional gain of £992m, mainly from the sale of pipelines assets held by a Dutch company and the valuation of some UK gas contracts.

It means Shell has now achieved its target of selling between $12bn and $15bn of assets this year ahead of schedule.