I have been covering energy markets for 35 years. I started when the conversation was about oil reserves, OPEC supply decisions, and the cost of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The frameworks I learned then still apply. What has changed is the scale and the urgency of what I am watching now.
The energy transition is the biggest structural shift I have seen in my career. That is not a political statement. It is an analytical one. Capital is moving. Infrastructure is being rebuilt. Entire sectors are repricing. The companies that were untouchable 20 years ago are navigating existential questions, and new categories of investment are attracting institutional dollars that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
I want to write about what I actually see in this market, from a perspective grounded in 35 years of covering energy equities, fixed income, and the policy and commodity dynamics that drive them both. This first post is about where we are, how we got here, and what investors who want to think clearly about the energy transition need to understand.
The Transition Is Real. The Timeline Is Not Simple.
The central tension in energy markets right now is between the pace of change that climate policy and capital markets are demanding and the pace of change that physical infrastructure, geopolitics, and energy security concerns actually allow. Those two timelines do not match, and that mismatch is where most of the analytical work lives.
Renewable generation capacity is growing faster than any prior energy technology in history. Solar and wind additions are breaking records annually. Battery storage costs have fallen dramatically. Electric vehicle adoption curves are steepening in every major market. These are real shifts with real investment implications.
At the same time, the world still runs on hydrocarbons. Global oil demand has not peaked. Natural gas consumption is rising in many regions, partly because it plays a bridging role as coal is retired and renewable intermittency needs to be managed. The energy security concerns raised by the disruptions in European gas markets since 2022 have reinforced how complex the transition actually is when you have to keep the lights on every day while rebuilding the infrastructure that keeps them on.
An analyst who tells you this is simple in either direction is not being honest with you. The honest picture is complicated and full of opportunity for investors who read it carefully.
Where I Focus My Research
At E3 Research Associates, my firm in Darien, Connecticut, my research has shifted alongside the market. My foundation was energy and utilities — upstream oil and gas, oilfield services, pipelines, electric utilities. I earned the Wall Street Journal's Best On The Street award for portfolio performance in the oilfield services sector and was recognized by Starmine and Forbes as a top stock picker in gas utilities. Those sectors are still central to what I do.
Over the past five years I have built out meaningful coverage of the biotech sector as well, which I will address in a future post. The analytical discipline is similar — understanding the science well enough to evaluate commercial potential, tracking the regulatory pipeline, and pricing risk into a valuation framework. The sectors are different but the approach transfers.
Within energy, the research I find most interesting right now sits at the intersection of the transition and the traditional infrastructure that is going to carry it. The companies building grid-scale storage. The utilities managing the capital expenditure cycle of decarbonization. The midstream operators navigating a world where hydrogen and carbon capture are adding new molecules to old pipes. The oilfield services companies whose technology is increasingly relevant to geothermal, carbon sequestration, and offshore wind.
The most interesting investment questions are usually at the edges of where the old story ends and the new one begins. That is where pricing is least efficient and where research adds the most value.
What I Have Learned from Teaching This Material
I have taught economics and energy investment strategy at the University of New Haven and previously at NYU's School of Professional Studies. Teaching forces a kind of clarity that pure research does not always demand. When a student asks you why something works, you cannot point at a model. You have to explain the underlying logic.
The question I get most often from students is some version of this: how do you evaluate an energy company when the future of that company's core business is uncertain? It is a good question. The answer involves understanding the company's cost curve, its capital allocation discipline, the optionality embedded in its assets, and its capacity to adapt. Those criteria apply whether the company is a natural gas producer managing a 30-year reserve base or a utility planning a 40-year grid modernization program.
What I try to convey is that uncertainty is not a reason to avoid a sector. It is a reason to do better research than the people who are avoiding it.
Why I Am Writing Here
I have spent 35 years writing research reports for institutional investors. The audience for those reports is narrow by design. What I want to do here is write about energy markets, investment strategy, and the analytical questions I find most interesting in a format that anyone who follows these markets can engage with.
Not every post will be a deep-dive on sector valuation. Some will be shorter observations about where I see the market diverging from consensus. Some will be about methodology — how I think about building a position, how I evaluate management credibility, how I weigh commodity price assumptions against a company's hedging strategy. Some will be about the broader economic and policy context that shapes energy markets, including the parts of the picture that come from my background in Middle East studies and petroleum economics.
I am based in Darien, Connecticut, and I have spent my career close enough to the action to understand how the financial industry thinks about energy. I have also spent enough time outside that world — teaching, working in the field early in my career, living in the Middle East — to know that the best analysis connects the numbers to the real world that produced them.
That is what I will try to do here.
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