The disruptions filling today’s headlines are also the best set of energy investment opportunities in a generation.
Four things are happening at once. Venezuela has opened its oil sector to private capital for the first time since Hugo Chavez began nationalizing it in 2007. Europe has broken with Russian gas and is spending heavily on the terminals and interconnectors that will keep the break permanent. A widening conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has shut in close to a fifth of the world’s oil and reminded everyone how little it takes to move the price. And artificial intelligence is driving the fastest growth in American electricity demand in decades.
Read that as instability and you would not be wrong. However, it is also the best set of energy investment opportunities I have seen in my career.
Energy is again what it was for most of the last century: a matter of security, trade and the monthly utility bill. Affordability and reliability, not the transition, now set policy in Washington and in most allied capitals. Projects that looked unthinkable three years ago are moving. Buyers are signing long contracts they had written off and money that sat out the last decade is coming back. The firms we work with are not waiting for the fog to clear. They are financing the terminals, pipe, storage and firm power the next decade will need, and they are doing it while the assets are still cheap and the competition is thin.
Geography was never a legacy issue
In The New Map, Daniel Yergin argued that energy and geopolitics cannot be pulled apart, and that physical geography still decides who wins. It comes down to where the oil sits, where the pipe runs and whose navy patrols the water. Most of the world’s traded oil and gas moves through a handful of narrow passages: Hormuz, Malacca, Suez, Panama. We built that network for efficiency, with almost no slack, and the bill for that choice is now coming due.
The market is repricing it in front of us. With Hormuz largely shut this year, Saudi Aramco has run its East-West pipeline flat out at seven million barrels a day, a record, using a Red Sea bypass it built in the 1980s for exactly this kind of emergency. Even that has a ceiling. A drone took out one of its pumping stations in April, and the berths at Yanbu can load only a fraction of what the line carries. The UAE’s own bypass, to Fujairah, has since been hit by Iranian strikes. Chevron, meanwhile, is back in Iraq, with a preliminary deal to take over Russia’s Lukoil at the giant West Qurna 2 field, another at Nasiriyah, and a seat in a consortium studying a pipeline that would move Iraqi crude to the Mediterranean without going near the strait. The energy industry is adjusting and the routes are being redrawn.
Being the biggest producer is not a shield
America is the largest oil and gas producer in the world, which tempts people to assume we are insulated. We are not. Oil is priced globally. As Jason Bordoff has argued, pumping a lot of it does not spare your economy a shock that starts half a world away. The driver in Columbus, Ohio pays the Hormuz premium whether or not a single American barrel ever crossed that water. What our production actually buys is leverage and the standing to be the first call for allies who produce none of their own.
I watched this from the inside. When my team lifted the Biden administration’s pause on LNG exports, the point was not to do a few American companies a favor, though it did, and those jobs matter. It was to make the United States the kind of supplier its friends can build a twenty-year plan around. A European utility signing an offtake that long is betting on American reliability, not American geology. Plenty of countries have gas. Few can promise it will still be flowing in a decade.
Once the approvals restarted, the projects and contracts came, and buyers from Warsaw to Tokyo finally had an alternative to suppliers that use gas as a lever. A Gulf Coast terminal is strategic infrastructure, not merely commercial infrastructure. But it is worth nothing if the gas cannot reach the dock.
The constraint is steel in the ground, not reserves
The country is not short of hydrocarbons. It is short of the means to move them. New England imports LNG in the dead of winter while sitting a few hundred miles from the largest gas field on the continent, because the pipe was never allowed to be built. Producers in the Permian flare gas for want of takeaway. Export capacity has outrun the pipe that feeds it. None of that is a resource failure. It is a permitting failure, and it is the biggest pool of stranded value in American energy.
A pipeline that takes eleven years to permit and three to build will not get financed, full stop. Alan Armstrong, who ran Williams for more than a decade and now holds an Oklahoma seat in the Senate, puts it simply: the permit takes longer than the pipeline. The same arithmetic governs transmission, which is really just a pipeline for electrons, along with the ports and refineries that critical minerals require. Cheap, reliable power is now a demand of both parties, and AI has made it urgent. When policy stops fighting physics, the money shows up.
Where the opportunities are
Begin with infrastructure, and in particular the redundant kind: bypass lines, second-source terminals, interconnectors. It reads as dead weight in a quiet year and becomes indispensable in a bad one, which is precisely why it needs patient structuring and people who understand both the policy and the deal. American LNG, and the pipe behind it, is in a class by itself. The demand is contracted, the buyers are allies, and the bottleneck is domestic, so the money is in expansion trains, brownfield debottlenecking and the feedgas takeaway that keeps a terminal full. This is where policy credibility turns into commercial advantage.
Long-dated contracting and storage have come back with it. A twenty-year offtake is underwritable again, and so is everything behind it. For years the market underpriced optionality, and that is now correcting. Firm power for data centers is the newest piece and the hardest to see fading. The load growth is contracted, not forecast, and it will be met by gas today and nuclear tomorrow, small modular reactors included, with the transmission to connect them. Critical-minerals processing runs on the same logic, only harder, because there the chokepoint is not a waterway but one country’s refining capacity.
None of this depends on the world calming down. It depends on the opposite. Governments have remembered that energy is a strategic asset, boards have concluded that resilience is worth paying for, and the smart money no longer treats a molecule’s origin as a mere matter of price.
The map still decides, as it always has. The edge goes to whoever reads it first.
