Did Fed Chair Jerome Powell Buy Oil Stocks?

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What Does Powell’s Comments in Jackson Hole Mean to the Oil and Gas Markets and Investors?

August 23, 2025 Clark Savage

Crescent Energy nears deal for US shale peer Vital Energy, sources say

August 24, 2025 Clark Savage

US Rig Count Falls as Drillers Play it Safe

August 22, 2025 Clark Savage

Michael Tanner: [00:00:00] Did Fed Chair Jerome Powell buy oil stocks? Next on the Energy Newsbeat Standup. [00:00:04][4.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:00:13] What does Powell’s comments in Jackson Hole mean to the oil and gas markets, but more importantly, what does it mean to investors? Federal Reserve Chair Powell’s annual address at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium is always a pivotal moment for the markets, and Friday was no different. His 2025 speech delivered on August 22nd was no exception, titled, Michael, monetary policy and the Fed’s framework for review. You can’t buy this kind of entertainment. It did shake the market up probably even more than Cracker Barrel, but let’s keep going. Economic growth was decelerated around 1.2 in 2025, down from the previous year’s pace. A notable update was revisions to the FRED longer run goals moving away from the 2020 average inflation targeting. Michael, this is important. And why is it important for the oil and gas? Because it also means, If he does go down 25 points in their next meeting, it means cheaper money for bigger oil companies when they go to try to do more drilling because we need trillions of dollars just to meet normal decline curves. What this also means is that for private investors, there will be everyone looking for where am I going to get returns. This is critical. [00:01:37][84.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:01:37] Absolutely. I mean, I think this decision to move away from that 2020 guidance of, you know, kind of what’s been called average inflation targeting now moving towards what they’re kind of talking about, like a moving target or more flexible approach. The markets, as you said, interpreted this, you know. Dow Jones was up one and a half percentage points, S&P 500. I’m in the NASDAQ. We’re also up. I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, from an oil and gas investing standpoint, the capital markets obviously are going to enjoy the fact that money is going to become cheaper. I mean, we’re about to talk at the end of this show about the potential crescent energy vital merger. I mean you’re talking to a $600 million market cap company with 2.8 billion of debt. I mean that kind of gives you an idea of how much debt a lot of these large public companies who may not have exact core acreage need to continue to drill. And if You know, if President Trump and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright want to keep following through on this drill baby drill promise with they had. They’re actually need easier. They need looser capital markets. They need money to more easily flow into this. They need to ease the restrictions if they really want to drill baby drill and keep prices low. Do I think that’s actually going to happen? Yeah. I mean, I think what you’re going to probably see is a 25 basis points cut in December. I’m not going out on a limb saying that everyone is sort of saying that post Jerome Powell’s speech, but I do think it’s important to of buoy the oil and gas business from a capital market standpoint. Now, in a pricing structure, who knows what that does? I mean, we’ve sort of been testing that $60 lower bound. We hit it earlier in the week. We actually saw gains this week as we’ll talk a little bit about what that means for the markets later on in the finance segment. But it’s going to be very interesting. And I think the, the scarier notion is that they decide to delay cuts. I mean, now that we have this moving target, it really allows the Fed to do what they want. And, you know, we could get in, we can get in a big discussion about this idea of 2% inflation, trying to manage that as they’re, you know, as their goal all around. I mean there’s a lot that’s wrong with that. Again, I do think for, you know, investors in the oil and gas space, it’s going to lead to possibly more drilling, but what that means relative [00:03:48][130.1]

Stuart Turley: [00:03:48] The best thing they can do to manage inflation is stop printing money. Let’s go to the next story here, Michael. Surging US LNG export, fuel growth and US shale. But how does this impact investors and businesses? I had fun writing this one on our substack, Michael. The United States is a solidified itself. And I use that word solidified as the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. Michael, for the uneducated from Oklahoma State University, that is LNG. Surging exports, driving unprecedented growth in shale gas production. As we keep going through 2025, this is reshaping the energy landscape. And I point to a couple key things in this article. Natural gas production has been more robust. Dry natural gas output reached. A preliminary. 3,327 billion cubic feet in May alone equating to 107 BCF per day in a new high that underscores the strength sector. That’s a big number. That is a lot of gas. That more than Jerry Nadler combined. Let’s go to the next one here. You take a look at EIA projects overall U.S. Gas output to rise from 103 BCF in 2023 to around a hundred and thirt- PCF by 2030. We’re going to need more than that in order to fuel the data centers and everything else that’s coming around. In fact, the death the, of the Permian is overrated and I’ve scheduled a meeting with Trisha Curtis, the CEO of Petro nerds to talk about the death of the Permian, is peak oil here and a couple other key issues. And she is a top notch person. She’s one of my go-to people when I want to talk about oil and gas stuff. But here’s where it gets really important, Michael, and that is the trade for molecules. The trade for molecules now means that people are starting to look at natural gas drilling separately than they used to be. And when you talk about drilling for oil and oh, by the way, gas is a by-product, we’re also tracking the natural gas rigs remaining more stable in the rig counts. And when we start watching this trend, I look for trends and we take a look at what’s going on in the future. Businesses are going to start taking a look at where do I put my business I’m going to put my business where I can get natural gas where can I get business and it’s also going to be bringing up another one I just interviewed bill amazetti and he is a cool cat from rosden data center just turn that into the production team he is working on the stargate data center this is a huge opportunity for. Businesses to take charge of their business up front, Michael. [00:06:50][181.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:06:50] No, absolutely. I mean, I think the other thing that’s really interesting when it comes to the growth of LNG is the fact that, you know, as we sit here, Stu, we’re analyzing, you know 10 deals a month, 15 deals a month and talk about trends. The Permian is getting gassier over time. The gas oil ratio is becoming way higher than it was 10 years ago. I mean you used to think about GORs in the low 600, you’re now seeing them over a thousand. When it comes to the amount of gas. And so what does that mean? It means that we’re not depleting the Permian, but not to get all reservoir engineering on us, but we’re lowering the bubble point, which forces more gas to come out of solution. Well, what does that mean, means we’re going to have excess amounts of this LNG as we continue to drill up the Permien as it still is one of the more economic places. So if you’re thinking about where is an investor possibly to put long term capital, LNG makes a great spot. Now the interesting part is I don’t think the value is going to accrue to the drillers because there’s going to be an excess amount of LNG that’s going drive prices down. I think where the value’s going accrue is a lot of these export facilities. The issue with that as an investor, you need billions of dollars. You can’t come in, you know, unfortunately they’re not letting the individual accredited investor into this. You need to be more of an institution to get into this, but if you are an institution looking to bet on energy and want to make a get involved in the energy business, LNG exports in my opinion is where the value is going to accrue as this shift happens. [00:08:21][90.8]

Stuart Turley: [00:08:21] Oh, I couldn’t agree more. Speaking of the crewing interest, the next story, President Trump’s tariffs and sanctions on India will do more damage to the U S dollar in a boomerang. Michael, I follow NIAS on X and also on his sub stack. And he is a very knowledgeable guy. Moscow and New Delhi both say payment bottlenecks have been resolved with most trade clearing via rupee ruble without the US dollar. I wrote this article after reading his substack and this is very, very important to understand. Russia dominates the landscape in India, the world’s third largest oil consumer and importer and relies on foreign crude for 85% of its needs and 2025 projections indicate India will import between 4.7 and 5 million barrels per day. This marks a continuation. It’s pretty important when you sit back and take a look. The death of the US dollar is not going to happen, but it has had a severe headache thanks to the Trump sanctions and bullying of India. [00:09:35][73.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:09:36] No, I mean, you’re, you are absolutely right. I think it’s the pressure on president Trump, if he wants to end this war swiftly, I think he understands it goes through India and China. The problem is there’s a lot of other. Extenuating circumstances around that. And as you, we rightly covered in a video a couple of weeks ago, there’s a lot more hair on that dog than it might, uh, then we might otherwise think. You know, India has become the third largest oil, both consumer and importer and relies on about 85% of foreign crews for its needs. I had to give you guys an idea. India will need to import about 4.7 to 5 million barrels per day with demand expected to grow about 3.2 percentage points, which actually outpaces China at 1.7%. So, you know, they need more, they need more oil. It’s, it’s, it’s really a shame that the US dollar, you know, it sort of like the man behind the mirror a little bit that pops out and says, wait, oh, you know, it’s just, you know, the whole, the whole value of the dollar that’s just based on the value of whatever the federal government says has clearly been deteriorated. You mentioned printing money. That has a lot to do with it. [00:10:41][65.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:10:41] You betcha. And I’ll tell you, I just, the weaponization of what the Biden administration did on the U S dollar did more harm. And I, if president Trump would stop weaponization, uh, the U S dollar, he would benefit the U.S. Dollar by stopping it. So let’s go to the next story here. Michael ERCOT project cancelation reached a record in Q2 of 2025. What is next? I want to call attention michael to this picture that is standing there with the windmills were the winds that they’re not blowing this was taken by this character called stout hurley as he was driving out of abilene on saturday morning and it was actually a very interesting to see. All of these windmills in West Texas not moving. In the second quarter of 2025, the ERCOT witnessed an unprecedented surge in project cancelations marking a pivotal moment in the state’s energy landscape with approximately 16 gigawatts of power generation scrap. Oops. I’ll tell you, we take a look at many of these projects. Only 9% of the projects in ERCot Q are projected to come online after 2028, signaling a bottleneck. Oops, this has led to $14 billion, over $14 billions in energy cancelations by mid 2025. This is. Pretty big stuff. Take a look at these cancelations in this chart, Michael. Lots of them happening right now. [00:12:14][92.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:12:15] Yeah. And a lot of that I think has to do with the shift away from incentivizing more stable streams of energy and this shift towards renewables. Now, I think things are swinging back a little bit. But again, as we predicted after the big, beautiful bill, we’re going to see a surge of projects being staked so that they can be eligible for the tax credit and then it’ll eventually roll over. And I think you’ll get back to natural gas. I think everybody’s talking about nuke nuclear right now when it comes to some of the future huge baseland. Based load demand. So I think it’ll be really interesting where it comes there. I mean, that’s a big number, though. You said to 22 billion of cancelations of clean energy projects. [00:12:52][37.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:12:53] And the argument, Michael, that’s out there right now is that you can put a wind farm and a solar farm. Faster than you can do natural gas or nuclear. But the problem is for each nameplate of a megawatt, you’ve got to have 180 megawatts. I mean, you got to have 180 times the megawatts. So even though you can bring a megawat online for a solar farm, you got add 180 on top of that because the math don’t math up as we say in Texas. Now the math The math ain’t math and math ain’t math and let’s go to this next one. Speaking of math ain’t math and holy smokes. U S orders Orsted on Friday to halt road island of wind farm construction. I got two questions on this one, Michael, in a significant blow to the offshore wind industry, the U S department of interior ocean. This is Doug Burgum. M issued a stop work order on Orsted’s revolution wind project off the coast of Rhode Island announced on August 22nd, here’s the problem. Michael, it is three quarters of the way done. It’s 15 miles south of Rhode island features 65 Siemens. GIMM’s 11 megawatt turbines is fully permitted. This is where it’s good news, bad news. It was fully permitted as of the halt order. The project was approximately 80% complete. All offshore foundations have been installed and 45 of the 65 wind turbines were already in place, leaving about 20 turbines left to be installed. I’ve got a couple of questions. I put in here the calculations of how the potential annual revenue lost on this was about $1.68 billion would be… Be around in there. But I could not for the life of me figure out how much that $1.86 billion would add to the average consumer prices because we’re now seeing it starting to escalate across the country in all of these wind farm and solar farms. Everyone is seeing inflation of green energy hitting their power bills. Everybody’s talking about it. [00:15:16][142.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:15:16] No, absolutely. I completely agree with you. I think Orstad’s in a very interesting position right now when it comes to what to do on a go-forward basis. And again, you would think Rhode Island. Rhode Island is a very liberal state, so you would that they’re all for this. But again, it’s a lot of this NIMBY stuff, not in my backyard. I mean, I think offshore wind is the worst. I you could make an argument for solar in certain areas. You’ve solar on your stuff. There’s an argument for solar. There’s an argument for onshore wind. It’s probably less than solar, but offshore wind. In my opinion, there’s, there is very little argument for it. The costs do not outweigh the benefits. [00:15:57][40.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:15:57] Absolutely. And the energy secure is talk about security. You can sneak up to the United States now because of all the wind farms on the East coast and those things radar does not do real well around wind farms. And I guarantee you, I would not want those sitting out there from a security standpoint. [00:16:18][20.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:16:18] No, I’m completely with you there. I wouldn’t want that either. So, you know, I think you also mentioned the, the potential loss, you know, it works out to about 84 million in annual revenue loss. So it’s not even a, it’s not even an overall winner for them right there. [00:16:33][14.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:16:33] No, and, and Orsted just absolutely tried to go back to the Danish government, get a bailout. They’ve, they’ve, have almost lost 50%. I have to go look fact check myself on that, but they have absolutely been obliterated as a company. [00:16:48][14.7]

Michael Tanner: [00:16:48] Yeah, it’s it’s absolutely so all right. Well, let’s jump over here and quickly cover some oil and gas finance stuff guys before we do that Let’s quickly pay the bills as always. Thank you for checking us out here on the world’s greatest energy website www.energynewsbeat.com Stu and the team do a tremendous job making sure that website space up to speed everything you need to know to be the tip of the spear when it comes to the energy and the oil and Gas business go ahead and hit the description below for all links to the timestamps links to the articles. You can also subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. You can subscribe to The Energy Newsbeat Substack, which is a great, great resource, which gives a great… Which we run a bunch of great custom to sub stack only articles a few times a week to keep you up to speed on what’s going on. In the broader energy ecosystem, how, and how everything plays together. That’s the energy newsbeat.substack.com. Please consider subscribing there. We have a, both a free tier and a paid tier with get you a lot of custom content, plus access to our entire archive. We can also, we also want to say shout out to friends of the show, Reese energy consulting guys, if you are in the oil and gas space and you at all need help in the midstream space, Reese energy, consulting has you covered guys. They have a tremendous team of of hundreds of years of experience on their executive team, when it comes to dealing with things going on in the midstream business, whether you’re an upstream company that needs help with your marketing or first purchases, whether you are a midstream company who just needs a project done from an outsourced team or you need some red team analysis, guys, the team at Reese Energy Consulting has you covered. That’s ReeseEnergyConsulting.com. Again, ReeseEnergyCosulting .com. And finally, guys if you are worried about what your tax bill is going to look like, I promise you we have a solution for you guys. Investinoil.energynewsbeat.com. Go there, fill out our tax calculator, which gives you an idea of what your taxable income might be, and then also shows you what an investment in oil and gas of that amount, what it would do to your tax liability. We’re biased here, but we believe that investing in oil in gas is the most tax efficient product on the market, not only because you get massive tax deductions. But because you also then get to receive distributions. This isn’t, you know, we love charity, but charity doesn’t give you tax, you know, doesn’t get you cash flow. You know, you go buy a car, great, you get the car, but there’s no, that’s a liability now, not an asset. So I think there’s a lot of different things about oil and gas that we like. That’s investinoil.energynewsbeat.com. Fill out that tax form, we’ll get it to you. You know Stu,. [00:19:16][147.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:19:16] Let’s look at, you know, quick top line indices. As we mentioned, S&P 500 and NASDAQ, both up about one and a half percentage points off the back of Jerome Powell’s speech on Friday, two and 10 year yields took a tumble down 2.3 and 1.6 percentage points. On that news. Dollar index dropped about a nine tenths of a percentage point. Bitcoin, you know, stabilized at about $114,000. Crude oil finished up about 0.22 percentage points up to $63.66. Brent oil, 67.89. That’s up about half a percentage point. Natural gas continues to fall down 4.5 percentage points down to $2.69. We saw our XOP, which is our EMP securities contract up about 3.4 percentage points, OIAH, which are oil for the services was up five percentage points and I mean. You know, all in all a good week for oil and I say good with a little bit of a caveat, you know, we’re still in that lower 60 range, but you know this was the first week in about three weeks in which we were up a lot of that has to do kind of twofold with what Jerome Powell talked about on Friday, but also the fact that there is some uncertainty surrounding a potential peace deal that could happen with Russia and Ukraine. I think people, a lot of people expected a framework to be announced last week. A lot of that would then ease the sanctions on Russia and not necessarily increase the amount of oil flowing from Russia, but increase where it’s going. So all the, it’s not all just going to, to India and China, which would theoretically add more barrels to kind of that global market. You know, quote here from Giovanni Stavano, who we love, everybody’s waiting for president Trump’s next step over the next coming days. It seems nothing will happen. You know? I think a lot of this ends up on, on, Zalensky’s desk to see what he will do. You know, it, it continues to be, to be pretty dicey over there. [00:20:53][96.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:20:53] On a rig count standpoint, Stu, we did see from an oil rig standpoint, total was 538. So still down one. And we did seen natural gas and offshore rigs staying steady. We’re down about 47 rigs year over year, which, which again, continues to continues to sort of drive the cycle on. [00:21:10][16.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:21:11] You know, after, you know, last week we saw four frac rigs added to the market. Well, this week, we saw about those two more get wiped off. We’re down about 64 year over a year on that frac count spread. And as we continue to, to again, it becomes, it becomes very soft from this standpoint. So we’ll, we’ll see how it happens. [00:21:27][16.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:21:27] I think the other interesting thing to notes too, and what I saw this weekend is, you now, from our favorite friends over at Reuters, Crescent Energy is nearing a deal for us shale pure vital energy, according to sources, you know, this story dropped on Friday, probably will get announced, you know, Monday, Tuesday, next week, depending on how things go. Obviously the person who leaked this says that things could still fall apart. I’m to give you guys an idea. Crescent energy is a market value of about 2.5 billion vital as a market cap around 600 million. They also carry, as I mentioned early in the show, about 2,3 million of long-term debt, which is Pretty, pretty interesting, you know, in odd combination, to be honest with you, considering Crescent’s energy position in the Eagleford, you know, their, their focus is really the, the non-shale play. And so I find it interesting that they’re trying to dip their toe in the shale water and not that I find it interesting. I will find it interesting that vital is the company that they’re going after. Cause I want to throw this up on the screen, Stu, you know, vital energies, market cap. I mean, if you, if look at this, it’s unbelievable, unbelievable evisceration of cap, that is a slope going down and, you know, to put it in terms of market cap at its, at its IPO in 2012, it was worth about $2 billion by 2014. It was all the way up to $4.5 billion and today’s do it sits as we mentioned, 600. Million dollars and 2.8 billion of long-term debt. So it’s pretty, it’s extremely unbelievable. They’ve got revenue of 2 billion, yet their market cap is 600 million. You know what that tells you? Their acreage sucks. And so the part that is just confusing from an energy point standpoint is I understand wanting to get into the Permian and trying to find inventory there to help boost your own market. The question is why vital? Or Vital if we’re being funny. I don’t understand this, to be honest with you. I think it’s an odd marriage of two companies that don’t align. Vital’s not necessarily known for the best acreage. I think they’ve got a master class on how to eviscerate market cap over the years. Doesn’t I mean, if you compare that with Diamondbacks market cap, it’s basically the exact opposite looking and they’re both operating with the same oil price. That’s again, the funny part. So it all comes down to acreage. I think it’s an odd pairing. I’ll be interested to see if that actually closes. This could be one of those. They test the waters a little bit. Again, this hasn’t closed yet. This is a rumor. So maybe this is a little bit of, Hey, let’s leak this to the press, see what the reaction is for the market, see, what happens, and then make a decision. I don’t think that per se, but it could be. It’s really all I got, Stu. What, what, what we miss? What are you worried about this week? [00:23:56][149.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:23:57] I just want to make a comment when you’re talking about rig counts and stuff, if you take a look at oil rig count over the current count, 411 changes from a year ago, it’s down 47 from a year ago. Natural gas is 122 rigs. It is flat from the previous week, but it’s only down. From the previous year. So that is a pattern that I’m looking at and have been watching. If you take a look at natural gas rigs versus oil and gas rig, you’ll see more of that as it goes forward, more steadiness in the natural gas. [00:24:33][36.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:24:33] Yeah. And, and a lot of those natural gas rigs is, is, is Hanesville Marcellus, you know, obviously there’s natural gas, you know, anytime the Permian picks up a rig, it’s going to be classified as an oil rig, even though there’s a bunch of associated natural gas with it. So there’s, you, you kind of just got to think Hanesvile Marcellis, Utica, when it comes to the natural gas. But no, you’re absolutely right. I think there’s a very interesting, interesting trend going on there. But that’s all I’ve got Stu, a great week for us. We’ve got a show coming out on Tuesday. You had a great podcast that you released on Friday. So everybody hopefully checked that out. But with that guys, we’re going to let you get out of here, get back to work. Start your week. We appreciate you starting with Energy Newsbeat for Stuart Turley and Michael Tanner. We’ll see you tomorrow, folks. [00:24:33][0.0][1457.0]