I spent a few days last week at the Catalyst Funds National Sales Conference in Puerto Rico. Catalyst is our mutual fund partner. It is about ten degrees warmer than Naples, FL where we’ve spent most of the winter, and the conference was once again thoughtfully located at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on the beach […]

On Monday the market dipped back below its pre-election level. The proximate cause was Trump’s ambiguous response when asked if there will be a recession. He has warned that the tariffs will likely cause “a little disturbance.” To this observer, the problem is more the rapid unpredictability with which new import taxes are announced and […]

Midstream companies are generally unaffected by the current round of daily tariff updates. Their stock prices may gyrate with the rest of the market, but nobody is revising guidance. It’s worth remembering that these are toll businesses, focused on volumes not commodity prices. Consumption of petroleum products is remarkably stable. It’s been between 20 and […]

Last week I gave a lunchtime presentation to a local investment club organized by Elliot Miller, a friend and long-time investor in midstream energy. Afterwards one of the participants came up to me and, disclosing that he used to work as a nuclear physicist, asked me what I thought of the prospects for Small Modular […]

Daniel Yergin is right to call it the Energy Addition. In an essay in Foreign Affairs called The Troubled Energy Transition, he notes that since 1990 hydrocarbons have dropped from 85% of primary energy to around 80% today. That can hardly be called a transition. Since 2000 global energy consumption has increased from 397 Exajoules […]

Suppose for a moment that the Sierra Club was a political party, with candidates running and elected officials in government. They might look like Germany’s Green Party, which has drawn support from idealistic German voters since the 1980s. They are politically left, view everything through the narrow prism of environmentalism and have a history of […]

It seems a lifetime ago, but in the latter stages of the capital bust that was the shale revolution, capex plans were often poorly received. In late 2018 Targa Resources (TRGP) drew the ire of investors when then-CEO Joe Bob Perkins dismissed criticism by calling their spending plans “capital blessings” (see 4Q18 Energy Infrastructure Earnings […]

Among Winston Churchill’s many memorable quotes is, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” This applies to some European countries’ posture towards Russia. The Economist recently asked, Will Europe return to Putin’s gas? Could they return to their reliance on Russian energy? The question has been buffeting LNG […]

On Thursday morning Williams Companies released their earnings without the rumored announcement of a Behind The Meter (BTM) deal. The stock briefly dipped as algos reacted to the news release but was soon rallying because the broad outlook for natural gas demand remains strong. It’s turning into a global high tech arms race. Proliferation of […]

On Monday Energy Transfer announced the first Behind The Meter (BTM) agreement of the AI era. They’ll provide up to 450 Million Cubic Feet per Day of natural gas to a data center being built by CloudBurst Data Centers in central Texas. This represents 0.45 Billion Cubic Feet per Day (BCF/D), almost 0.5% of US […]