This was a great live podcast with Tracy Shuchart, CEO/Founder & Chief Market Strategist with Hilltower Resource Advisors, and Josh Young, Portfolio Manager at Bison Interests.
We have had 6,811 views on my X account with 32K in impressions. People have really enjoyed listening to Tracy Shuchart and Josh Young. We also recommend following his Bison Insights Substack!
Major topics covered.
2. The impact of data centers and AI on energy demand, and the potential supply constraints and infrastructure challenges in powering these data centers with reliable and affordable electricity.
3. Geopolitical factors affecting energy markets, such as the impact of sanctions on Russia and the disruptions to global energy trade and supply.
4. Concerns around the quality and reliability of new energy infrastructure projects, especially in nuclear power, and the potential risks of rushing development without proper quality control.
5. The role of government policy, regulation, and subsidies in shaping energy markets, and the potential for political partisanship to influence energy and electricity pricing.
6. Investment opportunities and strategies in the energy sector, including the potential for a resurgence in coal, oil, and natural gas as critical energy sources despite the push for renewable energy.
The discussion covers these topics from multiple perspectives, with Tracy, Josh, and Stu analyzing the current state of the energy landscape, forecasting future trends, and debating the best policy and investment approaches.
07:18 – AI Hype vs. Energy Reality
11:42 – Nuclear Reality Check
16:03 – Coal’s Comeback
18:02 – Natural Gas Outlook
21:15 – Pipeline Bottlenecks & Permitting Trouble
24:33 – Chevron Entering Data Center Power
25:19 – Pipeline Twinning Not As Easy As It Sounds
28:08 – Geopolitics Ignored by the Market
33:24 – Demand: Stronger Than Narratives Suggest
37:05 – Sanctions, “Kinetic Sanctions,” & Enforcement Reality
42:31 – Dollar Weaponization, Gold Buying, & the Milkshake Theory
49:52 – Commodities Rotation & Energy Lag
55:11 – Propaganda & the Climate Narrative
01:01:21 – Pendulum Swings & Hope for Middle Ground
01:02:50 – Utility Mismanagement & Decentralization
01:05:04 – Will Democrats Blame Republicans for High Power Prices?
01:06:10 – Government Control, Incentives & Rate Failures
01:09:59 – Tracy on Fox Business: Uranium Bottleneck
01:22:35 – Closing Thoughts & Market Outlook
The Oil and Gas Global Markets Finacial Update with Josh Young, and Tracy Shuchart https://t.co/11GZG3kcV8
— STUART TURLEY – Energy Podcast Host (@STUARTTURLEY16) November 14, 2025
Full Transcript:
The Oil and Gas Global Markets Finacial Update.
Stuart Turley [00:00:09] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy Newsbeat Podcast. My name is Stu TurLEY, President CEO of the Sandstone Group. Today is a fabulous day. I’ve got two of my favorite guests out here right now. I’ve got Tracy Shuchart. I hope I said that right. And we we’ve got a great show with her. Tracy, welcome to the podcast. And I loved your Charles Payne interview this week. That was out of the park.
Tracy Shuchart [00:00:37] All right. Thank you. And thank you for having me on.
Stuart Turley [00:00:40] I tell you, I’m over here being a big cheerleader. I know her. I’m gonna get to interview her. When I I I don’t think he heard me because I was yelling at the TV, but great job on that interview.
Tracy Shuchart [00:00:50] Thank you.
Stuart Turley [00:00:52] And we also have Josh Young. I mean not just a Josh Young. We have the Josh Young over at Bison Interest. And I love your sub stack there, Josh. What do you got going on?
Josh Young [00:01:07] Yeah, so I’m dressed a little less formally and it’s it’s great to be on here with Tracy. Tracy and I actually both got to go to Vienna in February and I don’t think we knew it at the time, but that became more and more important for oil markets basically every day since then. So it’s really it’s great to be on here with with Tracy and Stu, thanks for having me back.
Stuart Turley [00:01:31] I’ll tell you what, Josh, on our last podcast, after you shared it out, let me go do the same thing and just take a brief moment here. We went nuts, and then it actually went even more nuts. And I want everybody to go out and also get ready to ask questions because you know when we’re sitting here and we’re looking at the markets, it’s great to have resources. And Tracy, I loved your interview with Charles. You had some really good points as a day trader. I kind of like having good information. And he asked some really, really great questions. Your website is Hilltower Resources Advisors. I’ve got it here and it’ll be in the show notes. But tell us what you were thinking on the interview with Charles.
Tracy Shuchart [00:02:32] Well that is kind of a passionate interview. You can hear what I had to say, I guess. You know, we were talking about lack or the lack of energy that we have right now to power all these data centers.
Stuart Turley [00:02:53] I I’ll I’ll tell you what, I I Josh and and Tracy, I’m gonna throw this out there. Do you think that we have got an oversubscrip of people getting excited if they invest in nuclear, you’re 10 years away from having some decent returns? I’m kind of looking at my future val I’m dusting off my old MBA book and looking at future value of money and you know formula, and then you sit back and go, are we oversubscribed on natural gas? Are we oversubscribed on nuclear? What are your thoughts on AI and investing?
Tracy Shuchart [00:03:31] Which one of us are you talking? Are you talking to me?
Stuart Turley [00:03:34] Which
Tracy Shuchart [00:03:38] Well, you know, I mean, I think that we have all this focus on AI. There are billions and billions of dollars being poured into this industry. Well, promises anyway. Can they deliver on that? We’ll see. We have, you know. Companies issuing corporate bonds to fund all this. Literally, Meta is spending money like crazy people, and not taking in, you know, eventually, I think investors will kind of wake up and say, okay, we kind of expect some ROI on all of your CapEx spending. But that said, while everybody has been focused on we need these data centers, we need to build out these data centers, we’re just gonna talk about this, we’re gonna say we’re gonna do it. But the fundamental problem is that we have a lack of energy resources for this and lack of energy infrastructure. That means we need more gas plants, we need more pipelines, we know more midstream, we need more midstream for nuclear, we need faster permitting. We have a lot of neglection in this particular area because you can build all the data centers you want, but you don’t have power for them. They’re useless, right? So I think there’s been far too much focus on building these data centers and not enough on how are we going to power these.
Stuart Turley [00:05:07] You you know, Bloomberg had an article, you bring up 19,000 really great points, Tracy. And Bloomberg put out an article about three weeks ago. And the power, the electricity prices, and I believe the Democrats are going to use this against the Republicans very shortly. And that is back east, there’s been a 230% increase in power in many areas based off of the increased government data centers going in, and the additional lines that are required are being billed to the consumers. And in O even in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the the Bloomberg article also said that if you are 70 miles from a new data center, your bills are gonna go up. Even in Oklahoma, Tulsa, Oklahoma, with lots of natural gas, their prices went up a hundred percent. And we just had Chevron just announce this week that they’re putting in two huge new gas turbines in a data center, and Chevron is now doing what Liberty Energy is doing, and that is they’re moving into the data center generation spot. Josh, you’re you’re you got some great thoughts there.
Josh Young [00:06:23] Sure. Yeah. Oh Tracy, you might want to put your thing on mute. I think there might be some background noise. And then just one other since we’re live, it makes sense, I think, to share if you’re open to it. That I think people can see either on YouTube or on Twitter or both. If you want to share on YouTube or sorry, on Twitter that you’re that you’re doing this that way people can see it live. I think people really enjoy getting to engage on this stuff. And then also I’m not with Hilltower, Tracy’s with Hilltower. Apparently there’s Bison Insights and a Hilltower above my head, at least on my screen, which is fine. Everyone should check out Tracy’s stuff. Yeah, I I really enjoyed following Tracy on Twitter over the years and she shares really interesting information. So
Stuart Turley [00:07:04] And and Josh, I will be flipping on the bottom. Follow Josh Young on X with your Josh your logo sliding across the thing on the bottom and Tracy’s, I’ll have that information sliding on the bottom as well too.
Josh Young [00:07:18] Yeah, so so a few things. So I I I mean I completely agree with what Tracy was saying. I think there’s sort of this undersupply of power generation right now. I think there’s sort of this weird dynamic with these AI data centers where the valuations of the companies that are building them out, the pure plays in the public market, as well as some of the AI companies in the private markets are valued at really extreme levels. But at the same time, there’s trillions of dollars pouring into the actual purchase of the chips, purchase of the land, development of the data centers, and then development of the power generation that’s necessary to go into it. And so I think it’s possible to be both skeptical, I think reasonably skeptical about the long-run returns on investment at 10,000 times revenue or whatever some of these, you know, pure AI companies are at, and then you know, the 10 or 50 or whatever times revenue that some of the data center or pure plays are trading at on forward like 28 or whatever, some of these have huge valuations and no huge market caps and no revenue or almost no revenue. And at the same time be extremely bullish on the energy that’s necessary to go into it, and you know, also acknowledging some of these bottlenecks causing some weird market distortions, like you’re saying, you know, Tulsa, Oklahoma should have very low power costs. Oklahoma is basically dirt floating on top of a giant, giant pool of natural gas, with some oil and condensates, but really like the way to think about Oklahoma is just, I mean, they’re truly blessed with an abundance of natural gas. And so very weird for them to have high power prices, and very weird for there to be this sort of competition in terms of residential power and even you know, commercial power, a store selling you know your milk or whatever should not be seeing radically higher power prices because someone’s going and building a gigawatt data center down the street. Like that’s not that’s clearly a policy failure. The the one the one area where I think I might have a slightly differentiated view on this versus the consensus is I I’m a little concerned and skeptical of the nuclear boom right now. So the SMRs mostly don’t work yet, and a number of the highly touted companies high valuations either in the public market or some of the companies that have been getting funded on the private side, they don’t seem to actually work. I I haven’t seen sort of functioning ones yet, and the ones that as I look into it, the more I look into it, the less comfortable I get with these companies and sort of their promises. And then just very high level I’ve gotten a lot of pushback for saying this, but I’ll I’ll say it anyway because I think I think it’s a reasonable perspective and I’d love data to the contrary. Build quality on almost everything post-COVID seems worse than pre-COVID. This isn’t one of those things where, hey, back in my day, whatever, but you know, there’s a there’s a noticeable difference, whether it’s t-shirts, which we had to make a giant effort to get these shirts made that like aren’t terrible, to, you know, groceries, to food at restaurants, you know, service levels are down, build quality is down, costs are up. And I worry about the implications of that on the most critical and complicated things that we make, like nuclear power plants, especially in the US, where we haven’t built any in decades. And so I really worry about the left tail risk. And it’s not that I think nuclear is is necessarily dangerous. I just think we’ve sort of messed up, and I really worry about I really worry about some of the left tail risk because of this degradation in quality. And I I think we have great engineers in America and in the world, we have great physicists, great talent, but I just worry that we I I would rather see us fix our quality control problem as a society before we go and build a bunch of things that could have the ultimate sort of left tail consequences on sort of design and build and maintenance failures.
Stuart Turley [00:11:26] My head just exploded because I got about nine thousand questions. And Tracy, what are you thinking about what Josh just kind of threw out there? And that is we’ve got a manufacturing quality control issue that relies on energy.
Tracy Shuchart [00:11:42] Yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree with that. And to his point, I want to stress that I absolutely agree about SMRs. I know everybody thinks that this is great. And I think the idea of it is great, except for it’s not really commercially viable. And we actually saw this happen with New Scales project in Idaho, right? It ended up costing much more. It was way over budget, it was it did wasn’t commercially viable. And so we’ve already kind of put that to the test. And so I don’t think that that technology, although I think it’s great in in an ideal form, we should not expect this to be commercially viable anytime soon. And the kind of nuclear experts that I have talked to about this, you know, agree and say, you know, what is best right now is what is tried and true and what we have done for 75 years, and that’s large scale reactors because they’re cost effective and we know how to do it.
Stuart Turley [00:12:45] Do you do you guys think that coal? I’ve been doing a lot of digging on coal, so to speak. That was a good pun, even for Rinochi. And that is, I think clean coal can be very clean getting rid of the particulate matter, since that is absolutely gonna save our grid. Secretary Chris Wright put out there and said we were about a we were approaching a eight, I believe it was an 800 or some huge increase in blackouts because of the number of coal plants that were being closed down. But if you look at updating the coal fleet, it is absolutely critical when you take a look at clean coal and let’s see, no power, clean coal. I’m kind of like leaning on let’s have some clean coal.
Josh Young [00:13:41] I’ll I’ll jump on that first. The so one, there’s rapid conversion of coal power plants to to natural gas. And so mostly it’s been on the ones that have been retired and but haven’t been dismantled yet. And so this is really exciting. It’s a big trend for the the energy, the engineering and construction companies. They’ve announced it, some of their shares have gone up a lot on the back of it. Some of the oil field services companies are getting into the sort of power gem of natural gas. And so there’s a little bit of this sort of trade off where some of the move away from coal has been towards increased gas consumption. But certainly you’re seeing it looks like all-time high consumption for coal this year, and then probably even more consumption for coal next year. There was this really funny report I saw that I pushed back on pretty hard on X, I think it was yesterday, where they claimed that Chinese solar was up and Chinese coal consumption was down. And you know, they pointed to certain waterborne imports, ignoring that, you know, imports from our Mongolia, right? Mongolia, the country were up a lot. And then, you know, the what you can tell, because China really tries to control their data and message using their state data for their sort of national sort of Purposes and propaganda rather than as like a reasonable source of reliable information, which maybe is like other government data here and elsewhere, but China is known for that. And so you can see from second and third hand sources that inner Mongolia sort of exports of coal, again, it’s part of China, but they’re shipping it from there to some of their bigger industrial centers. That activity has boomed, contrary to this, I think it was Bloomberg or something report. And so it does appear that both in China, from what I can tell, and I would need to see actually a lot of confirmation, not just sort of official statistics from the Chinese government, which is a communist party controlled country, you know, I would need to see a lot of data to sort of disprove that. But you know, coal consumption is rising a lot. I think it makes a lot of sense. And yeah, if we can get rid of some of these particulate emissions from coal burning, I’m all in favor of you know, burning additional clean coal to help provide some some additional power demand. What do you think, Tracy?
Tracy Shuchart [00:16:03] Yeah, I mean absolutely. And I think this administration has made a point that they were going to invest in all types of energy. That was coal, natural gas, and nuclear being the top three, obviously. And so I you know, I think that’s great. I think what’s really interesting, what you can do with the coal ash is that you can recycle it and you can get critical minerals out of it. And so there’s a dual purpose, right?
Stuart Turley [00:16:33] I I’ll tell you, let me let me also ask this because if we see coal, I don’t think coal will be as much as we ever saw in the past. I don’t think I think we can bring it back. And and that Chris Hedge on LinkedIn wrote a very good article this morning. And I want to ask, I he put out here, I didn’t verify these prices with a crayon. Since we barely have any runways in Oklahoma, my my crayons are almost broken sometimes doing research. He put on here why natural gas still sets the price. Besides gr the growth of renewables, natural gas remains the dominant fuel for US power, accounting for roughly 40%. He put on here that twenty two dollars and twenty cents for MMBTU in twenty twenty-four will go to four ninety MMBTU by twenty twenty-six. And when you take a look at the doubling of LNG exports plus the new natural gas pipe power stations coming online, I think this really could impact other items as we we go through this and say, this could be a big deal, don’t you think? Do you think it’ll get to that four dollars and twenty six cents in natural gas pricing?
Josh Young [00:18:02] So was that four twenty six or was that four I thought it was four ninety?
Stuart Turley [00:18:06] Yeah, let me go l look at it again here real quick. Four ninety, excuse me.
Josh Young [00:18:13] So so the spot price yesterday was was it 460 something? Now it’s down a little to 446. So to me that seems pretty reasonable. That’s only what 10% move or something up. And the forward curve looked roughly in line, you know, down a little in the shoulder season, then up again summer and winter next year. So to me it seems reasonable. We do have a lot of gas here in the US, but the gas that’s getting tapped now for incremental supply as well as to replace production that naturally depletes rapidly every year is incrementally higher and higher cost. And so we’ve had efficiency gains, but those efficiency gains have diminished recently over the last few years on the natural gas side as well as on the oil side. And so it’s forcing the cost curve up as you have more demand and get forced up the cost curve for that supply, you should see a higher price. And so that actually seems, you know, I’d say probably somewhere between 450 and 550 seems like a reasonable sort of range to expect under normal circumstances, looking at the next few years. And I I’m really interested in Tracy’s perspective. What what do you think on natural gas from here?
Tracy Shuchart [00:19:23] Yeah, I mean I absolutely I mean we’re practically almost already there at that price range. But I you know I really wanted to mention that, you know, even if it at say five dollars, we’ll call it five dollars, even that is relatively inexpensive compared to other countries. So You know, I that that to me in comparison to other countries, this is remarkably inexpensive. And certainly remarkably inexpensive to other sources of energy within the country to help electrify everything. And so I I think you know to me I don’t think that price is going to be prohibited in any manner whatsoever.
Stuart Turley [00:20:14] Do you think the the pipelines back east are a real problem? Because they they do not want any any of them. And we also are gonna have a huge AI, there’s a waiting list for five years for some of those big natural gas turbines. So I think we may be at a limitation of how much we can grow natural gas demand, don’t you guys think? I mean it it might be limited, limited, boy, that’s a new word, limiting by the pipelines as well as the But we’re also seeing Tracy and Josh, the flatlining of natural gas rig counts is flat. I mean, it is very good and solid, and the rig count for oil has been decreased.
Tracy Shuchart [00:21:15] Yeah, I mean, you know, as far as natural gas, we and I actually gave a presentation on this last year talking about we need midstream investment. We need pipelines, we need storage, we need investment in all of these sectors, and there’s a lot of opportunity there. You can get, you know, we’ve proven you can get a pipeline up really rather quickly compared to say, building a nuclear facility or something of that nature and gas turbines. I mean, we’ve done it extremely quickly. And, you know, there’s several examples in Texas where it took really under a year, which is amazing. So, you know, I think there are a lot of investment opportunities in midstream because this is where we also need to be able to distribute natural gas throughout the country and to get them to the dentist centers that they need to get to.
Josh Young [00:22:12] one point on that, I think one really exciting thing about the trajectory of development for data centers has been how many are going into areas that have a lot of natural gas supply and that were actually That were almost oversupplied at the local level for natural gas. And so when you look at the data centers getting built in Northern Virginia and going into West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And then you look at the development that’s starting to happen at a really rapidly accelerating pace in West Texas. I think there’s a real potential and a little bit in North Texas too. There’s a real potential to actually debottleneck. And on one hand, you’re seeing more pipeline developments, which are great. And like Tracy said, they should be really cheap. Some of them get built cheap. Some of the interstate ones, or if you’re in Canada or somewhere else, they get real expensive and they take magically the same thing. It takes three months in China and a year in Texas takes 10 years in Canada or forever if you’re trying to get it from Pennsylvania up to where they need it in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. So the debottlenecking and just going directly to the areas where you have this abundance of gas is really exciting. There’s lots of different industry dynamics and lots of different beneficiaries from that debottlenecking and from going right to essentially the source or near the source for the consumption. But I I don’t know, I think there’s there’s this risk, a little that you end up with, let’s say too much, at least from a short-term perspective, development in let’s say West Texas or in Pennsylvania. And you could go from Levy Hub or Waha or whatever, the local price areas and local hubs going from being way oversupplied to at least temporarily way undersupplied. You could see very interesting price dynamics, the sort that you know the John Arnolds of the world two decades ago traded and became billionaires out of. So there’s real big potential price moves. It shouldn’t affect demand too much, but it could dramatically affect local prices, profitability of producers, services activity, construction activity. There’s lots of different implications. And also the short-term to medium-term demand for some of the pipelines and other infrastructure that are getting built.
Stuart Turley [00:24:33] Ow, outstanding point. Let me show this. This is the Chevron rolls into West Texas for first data center project. This is on energy newsbeat.co and I I wrote about this the other day. And when you take a look at stranded gas and no pipelines in that area, you know, they zero they’re at negative dollars in in the in the panhandle sometimes. I mean in the Texas panhandle sometimes. But I’ve I’ve got a really good question here from Rodney for you guys. Great questions for your guests, Stu. Once pipelines had in the easements for existing pipelines, shouldn’t twinning be relatively easy to increase capacity? Pretty good question, Rodney.
Josh Young [00:25:19] Doesn’t it depend on who the president is and who the governor is and whether it’s interstate or not? I mean, the again, like the craziest part to me about some of these Canadian pipelines taking 10 years is that they were actually mostly twinned pipelines. So this whole thing on, you know, the TMX expansion, I mean, it was the expansion. It wasn’t even the first one. So it was just so unbelievable. It ended up costing what, like 30 billion or 25, some astronomical insane number because of all the regulations, whatever stuff. But yeah, in theory, it should be really easy. And it’s one of those things where you look at it and then you see China, and again, China has many, many problems, many issues. I’m not in favor of a command and control economy or totalitarianism or anything like that, but they build it in three months. And so, you know, I think that sort of tells you hey, if you’ve got all your political stuff figured out, you got your regular story regulatory stuff figured out. Infrastructure is easy and simple to actually build. And we just make it way overly complicated as some of these countries are showing us in terms of their build times.
Stuart Turley [00:26:29] And Tracy, what were you thinking about then?
Tracy Shuchart [00:26:32] So absolutely. I mean I agree with what Josh says. I mean, I I this really depends on how streamlined you get, how quickly you can get permitting done, how many lawsuits can you avoid from environmental groups? So you really it does depend on s you know state, local and federal governments.
Stuart Turley [00:26:57] You know, we are Tracy, you brought up a fantastic point, and that is we are so blessed in the US to have such great resources. And this morning you take a look at the geopolitical stuff going on around the world, it is pretty pathetic when you think that Ukraine just b hit some drones into the Black Sea area, and it it is really kind of caused a a a big export they hit an export facility there, and so it it really is kind of sad that we have got geopolitical issues to deal with. Ten years ago it used to be supply and demand and and now it’s supply demand and whether or not it’s got some serious problems with whether or not the Houthis are gonna be blowing up things and there’s a Iranian ship that just took a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. We’ve got some serious still things affecting prices geopolitically around the world.
Tracy Shuchart [00:28:08] Yeah, absolutely. And I think you’ve always had that. Look at the nineteen seventies with the Iran crisis. I mean, I think that has been an issue for a very long time. I think what people are more surprised about is that the oil markets are generally brushing all of the geopolitical risk off at this point. I mean, if you see, you know, we’re you know, just right around fifty-nine, sixty dollars, we have you know prices haven’t really reacted to any kind of geopolitical risk at this point. I think that has a lot to do with sentiment and the media constantly telling us that there’s a huge oil gut and that we’re going to have a giant global recession. And so, you know, I think we’ve seen for the most part of this year just really poor sentiment in in the oil sector, in the natural gas.
Stuart Turley [00:29:03] You you you bring up another fantastic point, Tracy. I’m gonna give you the old golf clap here. You know, the glut. The glut and the and smoke on the water, excuse me, oil on the water. You know, you sit back and kind of look at this, glut, where’s the glut is almost like that old cartoon or that old ad that they had the where’s my beef? Where’s the glut? Because I’m seeing a good, strong demand. Oil glut is kind of nowhere. I think we have more dysfunction in California from Governor Newsom than we should worry about glut on the water. I don’t know about that.
Tracy Shuchart [00:29:45] Your thoughts on that, Josh?
Josh Young [00:29:47] Yeah, I mean, okay, so so there is more oil on the water than there’s been in a while. So that’s that’s clearly true, right? And again, this might sound weird for me to say, but
Stuart Turley [00:29:59] Is the demand to the refineries is pulling it off and it’s just being tran transported around a bunch. I I looked at a couple slides that I have where I’m working on an article, and I you are spot on. There is a lot there, but the demand is pulling it off the water almost as fast. I’ve never seen that before either.
Josh Young [00:30:20] Yeah, the demand the non OECD demand and then US demand are both surprising to the upside. I posted on social media and you know, sometimes I’ll sort of troll a little bit on there just to get it’s really helpful to get People’s sentiment. Yeah. So I mean, IEA, these numbers are just nonsensical. That’s not even, that’s just dumb. And that’s that’s not neutral. They’re just wrong. They’ve been wrong for a very long time. They hide it, and then they do these kitchen sink every 10 years. They’re just like, oh yeah, whoops. Here’s a there’s a billion barrels that were supposedly in reserves that are, you know, in storage that’s gone, right? The missing barrels like Mike Rothman had talked about and various other folks. I mean, just gone. So that’s that’s just nonsense. But the you know, I posted this thing about how refining margins, I think they got up to $31 a barrel, the 321 crack spread, just very high level individual refineries, just like individual price points for oil or gas or whatever, you know, will have different profit levels and so on, but it’s very crude, just like you know, three barrels of oil turns into two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of diesel, as just a very high-level simplistic proxy for refining profits, which gives you an idea of how how much oil the refiners want versus what their capacity is, which tends to be a decent signal of demand. And really also market balances. So I posted this saying, hey, you see this and you’re bearish oil, because everyone’s bearish, right? You look on TV and just every person, every market commenter, every pundit, virtually. I mean, I don’t know, Tracy may be the exception there, but every single person coming on is a so bearish and there’s a but and and at the same time you have that those margins that are just so robust. They tell you that there’s something like you’re saying, different going on. And you can see in the numbers, right? When you look closely, non-OEC demand is off the charts, and then US demand is up. And everyone’s minds blow up when they see this because they think, hey, because Trump messed around with stuff with tariffs because of Liberation Day, demand should have collapsed. And it’s just not, it just hasn’t happened. And maybe it’ll happen in the future. I’m gonna channel my like Jeff Curry from 10 years ago, when when he was very, very bullish on oil, where he says, look, it’s not, he used to say, look, don’t look forward in the oil market. Look at today, because the price, it used to not price the future, now it does. But oil for the longest time priced what today’s market was. And in today’s market, at $31 321 crack spreads or wherever they are now, I don’t know if it’s $30, I think they’re up a little today. That tells you that we’re undersupplied for products. And if you’re under supplied for products in the middle of November, before Thanksgiving travel, with all this craziness from the FAA down and whatever, I mean, yeah, how much more bullish can you get, especially at $60 WTI? Tracy, what do you what do you think about all that?
Tracy Shuchart [00:33:24] Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely agree with that. I I was going to say, you know, we’re seeing draws across the board for products. So obviously the demand is there. So you know, those products don’t come out of the ground that way. You need crude oil to make them. And so there is obviously demand there. And then looking at future demand, you know, we keep seeing this growing. Why? Because we’re building out data centers, right? Everybody’s building up data centers. What does that take? Well, transportation. What does that take? A lot of diesel. You need a lot of diesel to build these facilities, right? And we’re talking about more critical minerals, more drilling for those, you know, in North America and elsewhere to try to pull those supply chain away from China. Well, what is mining use a lot of diesel, right? And so there is a lot of demand coming online from just mining and building an infrastructure alone.
Stuart Turley [00:34:30] You know, the the other thing I found interesting is we’ve mentioned tariffs and we’ve mentioned we didn’t get into sanctions, but sanctions on Russia seem to have started kicking in and the sanctions from the drones are starting to kick in. But the refineries sanctions never work. And it seems like they’re finally working in this case, with India now having to really work on getting their dark fleet stuff going on. I’m noticing that prices diesel prices going back to you know, the Russia oil goes from Russia to India, gets refined and then goes back to the EU. You you can’t buy this kind of silliness in a market. But it seems kind of wild that diesel prices, which they use more diesel than gasoline in Europe is now going up because of Trump sanctions. I don’t even know how to begin to price that bad dog. Your thoughts, either one?
Tracy Shuchart [00:35:37] Well, I here, I I’ll bring up something. I think what’s kind of overlooked right now is going to be November twenty-first, those sanctions on Luke Oil and the multinational international companies that they are linked up to because we’re already starting to see cracks there. You have to remember they have international relations and projects in many, many countries, right? And so we’ve already we’ve already heard about well that’s been in the news media lately is Iraq’s largest field, for example, is experiencing disruptions because nobody knows what to do. And they tr you know Luke Oil tried to sell part of that. They couldn’t. The deal collapsed with Gunvor. And but we they have it’s more than just Iraq, it’s Romania, Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Moldova, Italy, Balkans, US even they own gas stations in 200 filling stations in New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I was writing about this. Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, UAE. I mean, they Mexico, Peru. I mean, they are located everywhere. And there are gonna be a lot of problems when these sanctions come into effect. We don’t know. Kind of supply disruptions are going to happen. And I think people are really overlooking that. And so, you know, keep it on your radar.
Stuart Turley [00:37:05] Do you think Tracy outstanding points, Tracy? Do you think that there are going to be companies that take advantage of it? Like in Iraq, with Luke Oil having to shut down their production there, I noticed that we are seeing a couple other folks, BP and a f other folks get gearing up to jump in there.
Tracy Shuchart [00:37:28] Sure, they’re gonna be winners and losers. But the problem is is that it’s so much all at once. I don’t expect this transition to go that smoothly. Right. It’s not gonna happen overnight that it’s you know somebody’s gonna swoop in and buy all of their assets and so because they are wide widespread and you know, everything from you know upstream, midstream, downstream. So again, I think there’s gonna be a lot of supply disruption that people are just not prepared for right now.
Stuart Turley [00:38:01] Josh, what do you got there?
Josh Young [00:38:03] Yeah, I think I I remain pretty skeptical of sanctions enforcement, unfortunately. I think we’ve seen many promises over the last few years. And sort of similar, unfortunately, with these tariffs, the the real problem with sanctions, in my opinion, isn’t with sanctions, it’s with announcing them and then not enforcing them because what it does is it rewards the people who ignore them and it punishes the people who respond in line with the announcement. And so over the last several years, if you believe the Binant administration on sanctions on Russia, on price caps, on whatever, it was all bogus. If you believed the sanctions on Iran, it was all bogus. So if you were like, you know, XYZ trading firm and you chose to not trade with whomever that was sanctioned, you lost money. And if you were ABC trading firm that did it, you gained money and there were no consequences. Similar with tariffs where you announce them and then roll them back. If you build a factory in the US, you’ll get destroyed by the Trump policy where they do it and then don’t do it and whatever. If you just ignore it and keep buying stuff in China, they’ve Waived it and undone it over and over and over again. So again, I think like the big problem with the sanctions is that they just haven’t been enforced. The one kind of sanctions, which again, I’ve posted about at first I was sort of joking about it because people are calling them kinetic sanctions. It’s basically like Ukraine bombing Russian oil facilities. But like these are the ones that get enforced because the sanction itself is the enforcement of it. And it’s taken a little while for Ukraine to figure out they need to actually hit the export facilities for oil rather than the refineries creating refined products to really have an impact on Russian income. It does appear that they’ve gotten that message. And in the last month, the attacks, which have been ramping up over the last, let’s say three months, have been more and more oriented towards crude oil export, transportation and export rather than just the refiners. They’re still hitting refiners, but they’re now hitting more and more to the point where it looked like there was an announcement that a 2.2 million barrel a day crude oil export. Facility, one of the major ports exporting Russian oil has been temporarily halted. And Stu, I think you mentioned that at the start of this. So that’s a big impact. That’s a sanction that’s enforced by the nature of it and is very different from the sort of discrediting, weird bipolar announcements without enforcement that have been unfortunately bipartisan in the US, bipartisan in Europe and various other places. And, you know, and just my last point on that is I do think there’s a humanitarian aspect to this that’s worth noting, which is that we’re sending weapons to Ukraine and we’re buying Russian oil, or at least not enforcing sanctions on Russian oil. And there is, you know, I think when most of the time I think it makes sense to just say, hey, you know, there’s humanitarian concerns, there’s economic concerns, let’s focus on the economics. But when there’s this degree of egregious disconnect between the economics and the humanitarian aspect, Often those things end up backfiring in really significant ways when you get those sorts of disconnects. And it does appear one way in which that’s backfiring is Ukraine going and bombing Russian oil exports. I don’t know what the other ones are, but I know that when there are these sorts of extreme disconnects historically, you end up with, you know, Sean Iran, you end up with the Iranian Revolution where he was you had all these secret police and arresting people and all kinds of mess, you know, that sort of thing, like really, really big, wide-scale China having issues with their sort of domestic Muslim population where they, you know, sent, you know, watch this broadcast get disrupted for mentioning the Uyghurs, but you know, send them millions of people to concentration camps and other stuff, and there end up being all kinds of knock on effects from that as well as from China and so this is one of those things really big and where it’s worth noting, one, because we’re people and it’s terrible, but two, there are these potential economic implications from this disconnect of promise and reality and of sending weapons and financing it along with financing the other side through through the continued purchase and waving sanction enforcement.
Stuart Turley [00:42:31] Wow, fantastic points. Tracy and and Josh, I want to ask both of you, but Tracy on this one, do you think the over weaponization of the US dollar over these years, because Josh brought up a fantastic point, and I’m sorry, Josh, for being nice. I’m so sorry. But you brought up a fantastic point, and that was the weaponization of the US dollar. Do you think, Tracy, the the US has done itself the US petrodollar and the US dollar a disservice by over weaponization of sanctions? I I I think they have, but I would love your opinion on that.
Tracy Shuchart [00:43:09] Well, yeah, I mean, I think that we are starting to see some diversification away from the dollar because of that. I do I think that you know the dollar is still gonna, you know, be around in our lifetimes. Yeah, do I, you know, but you are seeing other the advents of people trying to circumvent using the dollar because of sanctions, because you know, we seized nine hundred billion nine hundred million dollars from Russia and et cetera, and so did the EU. But so yes, I you know, I definitely think that no other currency right now is viable to take over the dominance of the dollar right now, and maybe probably not in my lifetime, but that said, we are seeing the rubblings of people trying to diversify away from.
Stuart Turley [00:44:04] You bet and Josh?
Josh Young [00:44:06] Yeah, so so I followed Brent Johnson for a while. I think he he has sort of an interesting framework he calls the dollar milkshake theory, which I’ll simplify and maybe I’m gonna get it wrong, in which case maybe I just don’t understand it, or maybe it’s not what I agree with. But basically, when you get into crises when you have too much dollar denominated debt and too much dollar denominated trade, g given how much there is, when you have a crisis, you have people try to move away, all they end up doing is buying more dollars to net effectively go away. So you go buy gold, you’re buying it denominated in US dollars, so you’re moving away from the dollar, but at the same time at least temporarily, you’re propping up the dollar. I think the part of that that’s sort of missed or not sort of well understood is after that you’ve moved away from it. And so if you extinguish your dollar debts and you and you you know Have done this shift that does maybe temporarily prop up the relative value of the dollar versus other currencies as described in this dollar milkshake. After that, you can end up with the dollar getting crushed to some extent and moved away from for at least some types of trade and so on. And so I think, and actually, if you look at stable coins and sort of the US government’s sort of adoption of them and allowance of them and you know the regulatory shield on companies that have had real audit issues and other stuff like tether, I think you see sort of this move to defend the dollar and dollar denominated debt through these sort of alternative things that should actually be probably a threat to you know US government sovereignty, but they’re helpful to the dollar. So I think that is evidence of or an indication of some weakness in this dollar strength. And I think if we move too far, we could end up with sort of a big break in dollar dominance. But I think for now, we’re still in this period where the dollar is pretty dominant. But like Tracy said, yeah, when we and I think EU seized Russian assets after Russia invaded Ukraine, I think that really spooked a number of countries, and it did spark this move for central banks internationally to buy gold. It also slowed down the purchases internationally of US Treasury bonds and and other US government debt. And so that’s the start potentially of something bigger. But again, it could take many years, and you could actually see a lot of dollar strength on a relative basis versus dollar weakness. It is worth talking about, I think, here the currency sort of debasement trade and You know, people are saying, oh, hey, that’s not really what’s happening with gold or whatever. And I don’t know. I mean, you look at the my favorite part about the whole cryptocurrency thing, my least favorite part is there’s no there. There’s no intrinsic value in any of these cryptos. My favorite part is that everyone’s learned that there is dollar depreciation over time. There’s currency depreciation. When you print currencies, they do devalue, especially if you print them to meet government obligations, which is sort of the spiral down and unfortunately many societies, moder ancient and modern. So that’s become much, much better understood. And so is that happening more today than yesterday? Maybe not, right? We had a lot of that five years ago, maybe less of it today, but there’s still is still happening. And so when you look at it, I think I heard Tracy talk about this a little bit, and maybe if not just now, then in a prior discussion, where where you look at oil relative to some of these other commodities that have been bought because of this debasement, and oil and natural gas are very, very cheap versus other commodities and versus what we’ve seen with this debasement. And so, you know, if you wanted to bet on debasement, let’s say longer term, or a catch-up trade on the debasement we’re already seeing reflected in gold and various other currencies, you know, oil and natural gas and maybe also coal are. Really heavily discounted and have a lot of upside just based on what you’ve already seen happen on the gold side. And I I’d love to get tra Tracy with what’s your view on that and where where oil and gas fit in versus gold and
Tracy Shuchart [00:48:15] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have seen, we actually, if you look at the Bloomberg commodity chart, we are starting commodities are starting to break out. That said, it’s all been led by precious metals and industrial metals. What has been lagging are grains and obviously the energy sector, oil, gas, coal. So what I’m looking forward to in 2026, I think that there are we’re going to see some fundamental issues with like corn and wheat crops next year they aren’t supposed to be as robust as they have been, or that’s what they’re saying for right now. And so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a switch into, and I’ve been calling for 2026. I think, you know, I’ve been saying all year it’s not the year for you know, oil and gas necessarily, but I think, you know, looking into H2 of 2026, it certainly will come to fruition, because I think that it it’s been ignored in this whole AI picture for far too long. And then of course, like everything else, you go, you know, oh crap, we’re late. We need energy. What do we do? Right. And so No, oh yeah, we should have thought of this five years ago, right? But so I think that’s gonna be a central theme for twenty twenty six and I think grains possibly too. And so we kind of see a shift to some of those commodities that didn’t get as much love this year.
Stuart Turley [00:49:52] Tracy’s, Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead.
Josh Young [00:49:55] Can I ask a follow on question to that? So we’re we’re starting to see this like sneaky good performance of energy stocks versus very weak oil prices. And so is that sort of is one way to interpret that, you know, you have this extreme negative sentiment, you have weakness in the spot price in the commodity, you have all these news stories that are real negative, and then you see the stocks go up. And the the stock traders perspective and the investors’ perspective is hey, the equity market looks through the short term weakness and sees what you’re describing. Is that is that some of what you’re what you’re talking about?
Tracy Shuchart [00:50:26] That’s part of what my theory is part of you know what what I am seeing is absolutely we are seeing strength in energy stocks with energy prices low and that generally doesn’t happen. Generally sentiment follows oil price all all around, right? So at least people or some people are thinking we need energy as an investment and these stocks have been beaten up, they’re cheap, you know, let’s get prepared for this.
Stuart Turley [00:50:56] I I’ll tell you that that is that is a fabulous point. When you sit back and take a look, we’ve already talked about what we thought natural gas would be sometime in in next year. You know, the I I just wrote an article. It’s location, location, location as far as oil and gas break even points. Exxon put out that their Guyana assets are $30 a barrel break even. And when you sit back and take a look at the Dallas Fed, Tracy and Josh put out that great article where you have the different basins and the break-even point is by basin is is really around fifty to sixty dollar break even sometimes, depending on the basin. And Alaska, it ain’t sixty dollar oil is not break even because you got to get all the infrastructure built up there. Where do you think oil prices, Tracy is a follow up question that you just talked about? Where are you guessing for twenty twenty six?
Tracy Shuchart [00:51:56] I do not like to guess where oil prices are going because somebody’s gonna hold me to that. But but Josh does, so I’ll let Josh take this.
Josh Young [00:52:10] Yeah, yeah, no, that’s great. Yeah, I know I have the 250 WTI hat, which is up on that merch store too. I got like a thousand requests on Twitter for one of my friends came up with these in like 2022 when oil prices were skyrocketing. And so I like them a lot more when oil prices are low. You know, when oil prices have doubled in the last year, it’s like a little uncomfortable to have a hat like that. But man, when prices are below 60 or right around 60 WTI after gold’s gone to 4,000 and you have this sort of real big sentiment disconnect and and sort of price disconnect versus other stuff. I I I love these hats. So One, some of those cost numbers are totally bogus. There is no way. Maybe like the quarter cycle, just like the operating cost break-even for Exxon and Guiana might be $30 a barrel. Maybe, and that’s if they get some extra discounts on their FPSOs and whatever. But there’s just no way that that’s $30 a barrel oil. Frankly, there may not be almost any $30 a barrel oil left in the world. Even, I mean, you look at a Ramco and their breakeven and you know, their dividend break-even in like the 70s or 80s, and then sort of their full break-even for the Saudis and the 90s plus, it’s real hard. There might be some Canadian multilateral heavy oil, and there’s not a lot of it, but some of it that might be breakeven at let’s say $30 WTI and maybe one or two other spots. But there’s no way if you look across the the Starbuck block, you look at how much money Exxon has into that, yeah. The quarter cycle cost might be 30, but So the reason to talk about that is, hey, if you everyone thinks something is cheap but it’s expensive, and then the investment in that thing goes down and not up, it does set up for a super spike. And so that you know you could end up in this all-time high price environment. The the one other thing to touch on here is that since you asked on my my price forecast, I think that when you have governments try to suppress prices, you end up with an unpredictable time frame. So this is definitely not for 26. I don’t know when it happens, but I just have increasing confidence that it will happen. The more the Trump administration, the more various other governments try to suppress the price of oil, the more likely it is that the price suppression backfires and you end up with radically higher prices. And so 250 would be a inflation adjusted all-time high price for oil. And so I don’t know if it gets to 250 exactly. Maybe it goes to whatever one something or three something, I I don’t know exactly where, but both because of the underinvestment and because of the price suppression, I think you’re set up for a radical move higher in prices. I just don’t know, does it happen now? Does it happen next year, three years? I don’t know, but I think the the setup is there for a tremendous bull market in oil. What do you guys think?
Stuart Turley [00:55:11] Josh, this is this is Gavin Newsom. He just called to complain about you. You just described oh, hang on, hang on. Anyway, you just described California. So holy smokes, he got all upset. He was he just got off the airplane from Brazil talking about that. So great points. Anyway, I I think you here’s a great question from Rodney, and I want to throw this at you here. Great questions for your gre is there a way to bypass the rhetoric from the climate cult to reach the people with preg pragmatics and inexpensive reliable energy. We’re fighting a propaganda war, and from my point of view, logic is on our side, corruption is against us. This this follows right along, Josh, with what you just said and Tracy. What do you think about that?
Tracy Shuchart [00:55:58] Well, yeah, I mean, I think we’re already starting to see this narrative change. We’ve started to see it over the year where we see the breakup of the ESG bank alliance and the insurance alliance, and that narrative is kind of slipping away, and you know, suddenly AI, we need AI, we need to build AI, the whole world needs to build AI, forget the ASG at this point. No, I you know, I mean, that narrative is like I I think that just pushed everybody a little bit closer over over the edge. And there are people that are very upset about that. But you know, I guess we found our narrative to kind of get over that a little bit. And be, you know, there is nothing wrong with renewables, they have their place. That is fine. Solar is great. Wind I’m not such a fan of, but we need re reliable baseload power. So you’re going to still need fossil fuels, you’re gonna need nuclear, you’re gonna need it all. Like wind is not going away. Energy demand is not going away. The only the only source of energy that we have ever gotten rid of entirely is whale oil. And we’re still using all the sources of energy that we ever have before. We just keep adding new ones on top.
Stuart Turley [00:57:16] So oil saved the whales the first time. Do you think that oil will save them again when we get rid of offshore wind?
Tracy Shuchart [00:57:24] So perhaps It’s a roundabout way of thinking about it, but who knows.
Josh Young [00:57:32] I have a bottle of whale oil up there. It’s not act, it’s labeled whale oil. I was a Christmas present from Cuppy a few years ago. And you know, referencing that, you know, it is like Tracy said, the only the only energy source that’s actually gone away. And you know, if you love whales and you love the environment, you should also love the crude oil industry because you know, laws did help reduce the the hunting of whales for oil, but the biggest thing by far was not that it was the replacement of whale oil with crude oil. So you know, it’s a it’s a great point. And I have this fossil future book up behind me too that from Alex Epstein, which I think he makes a really, really good set of points in there to to address that. I guess one thing I I’d point out, I think there’s a there’s a risk around this sort of narrative on this, which is that it’s sort of similar to government policy failure generally, where you know you’ll have these terrible you’ll have these terrible economic policies implemented and they predictably fail. I think there’s real the real problem, I think, on the narrative on this is that you have policy failures and they just get blamed on whatever the media and whatever sort of the popular whatever folks don’t like. And so you can end up with a real disconnect from reality, which I think we saw for a long time. Fortunately, we’re moving it seems in the right direction, but I’d just be real cautious with this because I think it’s real easy for that sort of thing to backfire and to end up in a much worse place. And that’s part of why I don’t like this announced sanctions as well as government price suppression of oil by Trump, because I think some of the deregulation is really positive from a pure economic perspective. Cutting taxes, cutting regulations is a proven recipe for economic growth and for broad prosperity for many years in the future. But when you pair that with price controls and with promises about changes that then aren’t enforced, you end up just increasing the odds of failure and then a backlash. But the backlash is going to potentially punish and reverse the deregulation and the tax cuts rather than reversing the failed price suppression and the insufficient enforcement of sanctions. So that’s my problem with it and why I’ve been so vocal on it. Tracy, what do you think about all that?
Tracy Shuchart [01:01:21] So no, absolutely. You know, I think anything like anything, the pendulum always swings right to the other direction if you’re pushed too far in one direction. So, you know, I think we really need to find some middle ground. And I’m hopeful that that can happen at least right this second.
Stuart Turley [01:01:43] I want to give Joanna Freeby a shout out. She is facing a bunch of things in the Texas area as well, and she’s been very strong and vocal on this. We need more energy management to make sure the electricity stays on where it is needed. She’s bringing up a fantastic point, and I think that that’s not only just the she’s in really articulating very well on her Substack, and I’ll have that in the show notes when I get this published out on my Substack tomorrow. But Joanna is very spot on. I think we’re going to go to a di decentralized management and we’re seeing that by all the AI going behind the meter. So you’re seeing that behind the meter, meaning it’s not going to go on there, is going to be a huge change in how utilities make money. I mean it’s I don’t know even know how to begin to start on that one.
Josh Young [01:02:50] So so so I I sort of agree, but I I would take the exact the sort of inverse of it. I think the problem is that we have too much government involvement and we have these local area monopolies that have no consequences for failing on service. And where when they fail, they were rewarded with higher rates and higher profits and bigger exec comp and so on. So you know, I I complained a lot about center point around the power outage here in Houston a year and a half ago, around I think it was Hurricane Beryl, but it wasn’t about them specifically. It’s look like there’s there’s clear regulatory capture by it’s similar in insurance, you know, these government utilities, there’s various groups that basically have government enforced monopolies or oligopolies, and then when they fail, which they predictably fail because the structure of that is is such that there aren’t the incentives for success, you end up with more pushes for more government involvement when the problem was caused, in my view, and in most cases by that government involvement. So I think the problem is when you have no choices about who your utility provider is, and there’s no consequences for this government awarded monopoly for blackouts across Houston for whatever. And where they they re took the money that was supposed to be used for these gas power gen and for the whatever, and they paid it out in dividends and exec comp. And so that’s not capitalism, that’s socialism. And it’s it’s like crony capitalism or fascism or whatever it is, it’s not it’s not free market capitalism, and so more of that, in my opinion, is terrible. And the problem is you give that power to the government and to bureaucrats, and they get bribed and they get, you know, election donations and whatever. Like center point’s a huge donor. Like we’re paying, we’re forced to pay here in Houston these rates, and then they take our money and donate it to be able to then take our money and pay it to themselves and pay it in dividends. It’s a very weird corrupt system. It’s more Soviet, I would argue, than it is free market. So I don’t think this the answer is more Soviet-ness. I think the answer is sort of more Milton Friedman deregulation.
Stuart Turley [01:05:04] Let me ask this question. Do you think that the midterms I think the Democrats did a great job in seizing on finally waking up that actually people care about prices? Do you think they’re gonna the Democrats are gonna try to blame the high electrical prices on the Republicans? This is for both of you on this one.
Tracy Shuchart [01:05:28] Well well of course. I mean we you’re seeing this in California, right? I mean for forget that like California has literally chased everyone out of the state, practically, right? Every everybody wants to leave. Chevron wants to leave, you know PSX would sleep. Everybody wants to leave. They went out and then they are, you know, that’s somehow the Republicans’ problem and gas prices are gonna be too high because every refinery wants to leave California. And so of course, and that is that is indicative of American politics. You’re always gonna have every s one side blaming the other side for what else. But yeah, absolutely. You’re already seeing this in real time.
Stuart Turley [01:06:10] Rodney Get has a great comment here. Josh is correct. I’ll elaborate the establishment and all its tentacles desire to control us. This became clear to me during the pandemic and in my research and G H G research. Way to go, Rodney.
Josh Young [01:06:25] Yeah, I mean that’s like the sort of extreme and again I I don’t disagree with that, but I think this a simpler way to look at it is you look at the profit motive and you look at sort of the incentives. And the incentives for the utilities is to just sort of get take more money and have no responsibility. And the more they can push that, of course they will. Because they have a profit motive and they it’s just not that that’s that’s the way it’s set up and they’re able to sort of further that through donations and lobbying and whatever and through you know exec comp or whatever to reward their executives for for doing that. It’s not just center point of sort of the broader sort of utility industry of utilities like them, and then similar on the government side if you’re getting lots of donations and so on, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you know, this is a bipartisan problem. And like Tracy said, the pendulum swings back and forth, and you have, I mean, I don’t know whether they just desperately want power in the short term or of short memories, but you know, you see Republicans pushing to get rid of the filibuster when the filibuster helped Republicans over the last eight years and or last 12 years or whatever. And so I mean, you just see these just nonsensically stupid short-term things on on both sides of the US political spectrum. And again, just real simple on the power prices, power prices will probably go up. The utilities and the regulators will probably mismanage it. Both sides will blame each other, both sides bear responsibility for it. This isn’t meant at all as a partisan thing. And you know, whomever is in power is, I think, responsible to try to implement the best rules and best policies possible for their constituents. And you know, it’s unfortunate that the Trump administration isn’t doing that in the same way as the Biden administration didn’t. And then, you know, in specific states, I think you have real problems in terms of both Democrat-led states and Republican-led states in terms of those failures. And so you’ll see people vote back and forth. But again, I don’t know that changing the party that’s ostensibly in charge really changes it that much, unfortunately. So you know, I think I think the future is probably higher power prices for a while. And one really nice thing, which Stu, you referenced and Tracy has talked about too, is that as we move towards this big power gen development of more natural gas, of more coal, and in the future, hopefully, of safe, large-scale nuclear that’s you know, well-engineered, using well-understood designs with hopefully triple checked construction quality, which I’m skeptical of, but hopefully they’re able to do it right. As we ramp that, we should eventually get to another period of very low power prices here in the US. And even you know, with all that drama, it’s still way cheaper even in California than most places in the world for power. So even where we’re failing, we’re still better than most of the rest of the world on policy. So you know, it’s not not not too too bad. And and the other thing is because of these problems, there is going to be this impetus for government intervention and subsidies to build out more and more power gen. And that will eventually be capital destructive. And what it’s gonna lead to, I think, is this shift in economics from the utilities and from the LNG exporters and even from the midstream guys over to the producers and services companies and to the ultimate benefit of consumers. So I see that sort of pricing power and profit power over, let’s say the medium to longer term shifting from the folks that have been sort of getting most of it to potentially a different part of that value chain getting more of it.
Stuart Turley [01:09:59] Well, Tracy, I just want to give you a shout out. I thoroughly enjoyed your interview with Charles Payne this week. I just want to show just a minute of it here, just and bring that up here. Cause that was really pretty cool. And let’s that was a slide. Sorry, I had the wrong thing here. Let’s bring this up here and
Video Speaker (FOX Host) [01:10:20] Financing needs, oh boy, the circular financing, five trillion dollars, where do you get it? And then energy needs. I gotta tell you something. When it comes to energy, you gotta think about this. There’s no better guess than Ninja Trader Group, their senior economist, Tracy Schuhkart. Tracy, I just much has been made about this, obviously the energy storage situation that’s needed to achieve this AI center, at least the goals that we have in mind. And and the great hope is that nuclear is gonna play a massive role to help us get there. You know, so much of it right now, I mean just it’s the the uranium part of it, so much of it we the we bring in how we have to to in import a and I know there’s been an uptick recently in domestic production. Are are w are you how confident are you we’re gonna have the uranium that we need to to build up the nuclear power plants to fund to power these data centers?
Tracy Shuchart [01:11:11] Well, I think, you know, we need to approach this kind of in a different way. US has indeed had explosive twelve hundred percent growth going from almost zero to in domestic mining. That said, these mines are only operating at about twenty eight percent of capacity because there’s nowhere to process the ore domestically. So the biggest hurdle really isn’t the amount of or the shortage of uranium in the ground. It’s kind of a lack of domestic infrastructure to process it. But the good news is is that the government has just allocated two point seven billion to support this effort and this is
Stuart Turley [01:11:53] I’m gonna have this in the Substack as well because this was absolutely huge, Tracy. You did a great job there. So do you think the critical mineral mix for investors right now, do you think that we’re gonna be able to actually I think we can get the critical minerals here, but it’s the processing like you were talking about. Is that how are we gonna solve that?
Tracy Shuchart [01:12:18] Well, it’s in general. We need a lot of again midstream for this sector, right? Because China really has the market cornered on not only, you know, rare earths aren’t rare, first of all. They are a lot of places. But you know, it’s really obvious of them and the which they have cornered the market. So if we are going to address this issue and not have to be so dependent on China, not only the US, everybody, then we need processing domestically or in you know domestic friendly near shore near shoring companies that we’re that we’re gonna have to, you know, that’s where we’re gonna have to invest in. And I know a lot of people don’t want it in their backyard because it’s dirty to for lack of a better word. But you know, again, I think there’s a lot of investment opportunities there as well. We just need to look at the picture holistically rather than you know, one portion of the sector.
Stuart Turley [01:13:25] Right fantastic. And I I really like let’s take a look here. Let’s take a look. Joanna again has a great comment. At least emergency management should have the best interest of the people at front and center. They’re the only ones to provide where and when the lights stay on when things like batteries are sighted and evacuate evacuation routes. Again, Joanna’s a great one to follow on LinkedIn as well. Josh, where do you see critical minerals as a commodities type investment? I mean, is it do you look at the miners? Do you look at those kind of things?
Josh Young [01:14:02] What are your thoughts there? Yeah, I mean my observation there, having seen this play out repeatedly, is that for the most part these things are uninvestable for me because they are they are dependent entirely on government involvement. And so the higher prices are driven by China withholding these things right now, due to certain specific trade policies the US don’t doesn’t or is doing that they don’t like and you know it seems sort of this like retaliatory buildup. What we’ve seen historically is that they’ll wait until there’s a lot of money in this stuff and that projects are let’s say a quarter of the way through, and then they’ll just flood the market with this stuff again. And so even if the government provides the remaining capital that hasn’t been raised yet or whatever, or whatever capital is pulled out if the government backstops it, even then it’s still hard to see these things being truly economic over the long run, given where they sit on the cost curves. So should they be built for national security reasons? Maybe. But you know, as free market as I am, this sort of thing actually seems better done by the government than by because of the interference by China and sort of their their sort of national security-oriented stuff. So the these stocks they’re they’re sort of uninvestable to me because again, like you get either Trump changing his mind tomorrow or China changing their mind tomorrow or whatever and they they go away. They’re sitting so high on the cost curve. They are necessary, but again, it’s just like, how do you know when that’s going to happen? And everyone forgets like MP, whatever, like it was Molly Corp and it had a big boom and then it went to zero. And you know, everyone sort of forgets there was a Tremoth like SPAC that whatever that got pumped and then crashed and then you know it was getting pumped again. So I don’t know. I I I I don’t own that menu is men as financial recommendation. But to me, these sorts of things are I’m almost more comfortable owning, let’s say an oil producer when the government’s trying to put them out of business with the sort of Trump administration nonsense and the Biden administration nonsense and the Trump administration nonsense before than I am in investing in something that’s currently favored by the government but that would collapse and go away if the government support disappeared one day. So that’s my framework on it.
Stuart Turley [01:16:21] You bet. Hey, Tracy, again, thank you for your great insights today. We’re running white starting to wind down here in a bit. Tell us how people contact you and and what you do for
Tracy Shuchart [01:16:33] So yeah, I’m I’m getting kicked out of the studio right now. So I will I will have to leave. But I am on Twitter at Chigrl C H I G R L. I’m on Ninja Trader Live in our YouTube channel every morning at eight AM to eight forty five AM and then again on at two to two two again at two thirty PM. So go to NinjaTrader YouTube channel and I host a macro show there every morning at eight AM so
Stuart Turley [01:17:07] Well, thank you so much again. And I look forward to more visits with you. And we’ll be sharing all this out. Again, you hit it out of the park with Charles. You did so good there. Josh, as we wind down, where do people find you?
Josh Young [01:17:23] Sure. Yeah. The best way to to find me is at Bison Insights dot info. If you have to run Tracy yet. Thank thank you for joining. This this was great. Thank you.
Stuart Turley [01:17:32] Great job, Tracy.
Tracy Shuchart [01:17:33] Thank you.
Josh Young [01:17:36] Yeah, what a what a a pleasure. I I I really like Tracy. We got to know each other both through Twitter and then got to meet in person over the years and and she she’s great, really, really great insights. So yeah, we have the spicing insights.info launched a newsletter, I think almost six months ago now. We’re getting close to that five months ago. We really had really good uptake, shared some stock ideas. I get asked all the time for stock ideas, whether at, you know, meetups with friends or cocktail parties or Twitter messages or posts or whatever. And I I had a problem, which was one, I run an investment fund, which is separate from this newsletter, and it’s a compliance problem for me to talk about positions ever pretty much. And so the other problem was I would talk about them sometimes and people would like three years later be like, Oh yeah, I bought this stock and then it went down. It’s like, okay, well, you know, I posted two years ago that I sold it. So I don’t like, how do I? So to address both the sort of reputation management aspect of it as well as you know, actually, and again, none of this is meant as investment advice, but the very worst thing possible is to talk about something, and then after I don’t own it anymore, someone sees that I talked about it many years ago, buys it, loses money, like that part’s you know, just terrible. So compliance, reputation management, and also like to the extent, again, that I can be educational and helpful in a timely manner, putting it all in one spot made sense. Charging a nominal amount of money for it made sense. And then the one other part that I haven’t really talked about too much publicly, but I probably should, and I I think we’re gonna put out something on this a little bit more over the holidays in terms of like explaining like what I’m doing with this thing. Because look, I run an investment fund with a ton of money in it. I’ve made a lot of money from that. I’m really lucky to have done that, and you know, I stuck with it. I sort of, it’s like, I don’t know if it’s brilliance per se, as much as just you know, similar to like the forest gump sort of thing, where you know, buying a shrimp and boat was a terrible idea, but surviving the storm was great. So, you know, I really lean to the bison thing, especially oil’s up a lot today, everything else is down. So sort of bison’s almost the equivalent of that like forest gump, like shrimp and goat thing. But when we launched Bison Interest, my investment firm many years ago, there were many firms that did oil and gas public equity investing, and now we’re one of the last ones. So when there was this sell-off around liberation day in April of this year, I took So the investment firm, I I generate income from it and I also am the largest investor in the fund, I think. I’m the largest or second largest at this point. And so I I generate income in the form of a management fee off of that. And generally what I’ve done is accrue it and reinvest it, but sometimes I use it for, you know, paying taxes because that’s taxable and so on. And I was supposed to be taking some of that management fee and you know, paying taxes with it and you know, paying for my life, and you were having a third kid, so it was the prudent thing to do. And instead, oil stocks fell, and there was just this fantastic opportunity to deploy capital into the market. And so I told my clients at the time that I was putting more money in, and I basically took my remaining liquidity and I invested it in oil and gas stocks. And so the thought was, hey, I’ll do that and I’ll go start generating income to sort of pay day-to-day expenses on or whatever via this other means where I have this big social media following, I have all these people bugging me for, hey, what what stock should I buy? And it’s like, well, I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you what I’m buying. And so sort of charging a nominal amount to a very large number of people, solved this problem of basically allowing me to go buy the dip with remaining liquidity. And I mean, it’s been fantastic. I mean, these oil stocks are up a ton since then, published something saying I was doing it, explained how I did it. And so this is basically my like, you know, pizza money to be able to then put all of my net worth essentially into publicly traded oil and gas stocks in this investment firm that I manage, that I own, that I’m the largest investor in. So it was me essentially doubling down into that at a just phenomenal time. But again, you have to sort of balance these things, and so the ownership of these stocks is a long-term sort of thing versus Being able to generate subscription and gun through a through a newsletter. So there is the business and sort of personal finance aspect. I think you and I have talked about this. I had an intern many years ago is now famous for giving advice that would say the exact exact opposite of doing what I did. Morgan Houseel, I think I have his book up here somewhere. So he he would say, Hey, you’re supposed to pull money out of where you make your money day to day or whatever. And I I ordered his bison doubled down. So anyway, that was a long spiel on bison insights, but bison insights.info, I share about one stock idea a month. I interview executives and industry insiders and industry experts and various other folks that have unique perspectives on their
Stuart Turley [01:22:51] I got to give you a shout out for the merch. I’m waiting for my mug. The still an old oil bowl. I cannot wait to get it.
Josh Young [01:22:59] So this is this is for marketing for the newsletter. So it turns out there’s wild price inflation. We shopped around a lot and we couldn’t find a site that would be sort of both more reliable globally and cheaper than Printify. And there’s like a few dollar margin on any of these items, and I’m donating a hundred percent of my net profits on this to local charities. So the first one is I think it’s appropriate, it’s the Houston Zoo, given the sort of bison theme. And you know, next up, I think I don’t know, we might do some community organization or community center or something like that. But for now the zoo, the zoo seems to be a good spot to so just like it may sound weird, right? I’ve made all this money in and investment management, I have this newsletter, and now I’m like selling whatever. And so it’s just I got asked at least a hundred times for these 250 WTI hats. So they exist. If you want one, go ahead and buy one and I will donate my profits from this. I am donating them already to the Houston Zoo. So and then to future nonprofits and charities and so on.
Stuart Turley [01:24:08] I love it. Well, and you can find me on the energynewsbeat.substack.com. And I just released the unpopular truth about energy and had a fantastic interview with Dr. Lars, who wrote the book on that. And he is a cool cat. And then also energynewsbeat.com and go come see me there. And we have got a lot of fun. Again, this was a lot of fun, Josh. I really appreciate you setting this up with Tracy. She hit it out of the park today, as well as with Charles Payne on Fox.
Josh Young [01:24:44] Yeah, yeah, big big Tracy fan. And then just you’re you’re real humble. So I’ll I’ll throw this in. So I have this man in a hard hat, bobble hat, which bobblehead, which is from Entercom. They used to do they still host their conferences. They used to do every year a different bobblehead related to the oil and gas and energy industries and Stu used to do a lot of stuff for them. And the thing you would do most that I would interact with him on was bringing executives, whether it’s you know, senior executives of national oil companies or giant, you know, international oil companies or tiny microcap companies, sort of the whole gamut to come to come meet up with me to get to to learn about their their stories and so on. So Stu is a seasoned industry executive with a lot of different perspectives. And so, you know, I like the the openness to to silliness and to sort of all these different aspects of media, but also there’s this real depth of experience and knowledge that I think is worth highlighting. And I you know, I I really I also appreciate your humility and that you don’t sort of lead with all that. And so, you know, it’s great. You know, I think I think you have a gamut of folks, some of whom I agree with or disagree with or whatever, on your different stuff, your different platforms and news sources and so on. But I think you come at it from just an enormous amount of perspective and experience. So, you know, I appreciate you having me on this. I thought it was real great to get to have Tracy on here too. You know, I can’t can’t say enough good things about you, and I appreciate you again for having me on.
Stuart Turley [01:26:25] Thank you. I can’t wait to do it again. And we’ll get some other folks. If you’re interested in advertising on Energy Newsbeat, just go to the energynewsbeat.co and take a look at some of the ads on there. Or if you want to buy the bison insights stuff so we can donate it, it’s even better. But your Substack is worth the money. So I highly recommend people go to bisoninsights.info and go subscribe there and go to my Substack. So with that, I’m gonna go ahead and close this out here. This is this went by in about five minutes, but we’ve been online for an hour 27 minutes, and it went it felt like five minutes, which tells me it was a great discussion. Thank you for your time.
Josh Young [01:27:12] Yeah, super fun. Thanks and thanks to anyone that’s watching this. All right. See you guys. Bye bye.
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