Yellowbull

After a great 2025 that returned 175.5%, I have been spending the past week on a 10-page analysis piece that extensively covers the 5 companies (+ some honorable mentions) I am most excited for in 2026 From uranium to lithium and gold, here is the list ⤵️ patreon.com/posts/14724634…

@CarrasxoJose Thank you Jose!

@Yellowbull11 Always amazing work. Thanks

The most asked question I got over the past 4 days was whether this rally was 'real' or not, as the messaging around a potential ceasefire has been mixed to say the least I put all the data and information together and you can read the conclusion here: patreon.com/posts/is-this-…

@quakes99 Thank you so much for the continued support my friend, it means the world!

In @YellowBull11's new 63-page Contrarian Codex newsletter today, he pegs investor sentiment towards #Uranium & #Nuclear #stocks at the 'Hope' level of 56 out of 100, which confirms my observation of barely positive engagement.🤷‍♂️ U really must subscribe to his fabulous work!🤠🐂 👉patreon.com/posts/contrari…

Energy = wealth The solution is not to use less energy, but to create more of it

Comstock Metals commissioning is advancing very well with equipment arrival, assemblies and power connectivity all in progress. The last scheduled equipment arrival was the scrubber (arrived Monday) and the Ovens (10 massive truck loads) that started arriving yesterday. $LODE

In this week's report: -Is this recovery rally the real deal? -How to position for what is happening in credit markets -Insights from Grant Isaac and Kazatomprom -Gold has been consolidating, but what's next? All that and much more in this 60 page report: patreon.com/posts/contrari…

@nikon_invest @marketplunger1 @Uzocapital Cheers Nikon! Thank you

@Yellowbull11 @marketplunger1 @Uzocapital Superbly covered, as ever. Thanks Mart

A lot has been made of this news and the impact it could have on uranium production, particularly out of Kazakhstan, but it requires a lot of nuance and I spent the weekend going over the sulphuric acid market There is a lot to get into, but let's start with the basics. China consumed 24 million tons of sulphuric acid in 2024, the United States 16 million, and Russia 12 million, with the three of them combined accounting for 40% of global consumption and at the same time China accounts for roughly 21% of global production, which is more than twice the output of the second-largest producer, which is the US. On the export side the picture gets a little messy depending on which dataset you use, with some trade-flow trackers putting China at around 42% of global sulphuric acid export shipments between July 2024 and June 2025 while value-weighted statistics place Canada, Peru, and China together at about 35% of global exports by value in 2024. Either way, China is one of the two or three swing exporters that the rest of the world leans on when regional balances tighten, and its export flows are mostly by-product acid from copper and zinc smelters rather than dedicated production. Beijing already called for tighter limits on sulphuric acid exports back in December, and the Iran war and ensuing constraints on the Strait of Hormuz have tipped some oversupply situations into undersupply according to reports I was reading from CNBC and now the May halt extends that trajectory further. Of course there is a Gulf connection as well, even if it is not always obvious. The Middle East does not ship much finished sulphuric acid to Central Asia, but it is the world's largest source of raw sulphur feedstock, with the UAE supplying 34% of global sulphur exports by value, Kazakhstan second at 7.8%, and Qatar third at 6.6%, and around 56% of China's sulphur imports came from the Middle East in 2025 CNBC. So Hormuz disruption constrains Gulf sulphur flows, Chinese acid producers scramble to replace feedstock and Beijing reacts by locking domestic acid at home to protect its own fertilizer and metals sectors. It is a cascade that starts in the Gulf and ends in mineral projects, like a set of supply chain dominoes. My apologies for that global sulphuric acid market detour, but circling back to Kazatomprom specifically, and here I want to be careful with the numbers because the public disclosure is a bit fuzzy. From what I can tell, and trust me I tried, Kazatomprom does not publish a country-of-origin breakdown for its acid procurement, and management's 2024 language about sourcing from "neighboring countries" never quantified the split (if someone has more accurate data on this, let me know and I will add it to the data set). What the trade data does show is that Kazakhstan as a country, at least according to the data I could find, imported about 526,000 tons of sulphuric acid in 2024 and 624,000 tons in 2023, making it one of the ten largest importers globally, and the country-of-origin breakdown in the datasets has Russia as the dominant supplier with Uzbekistan a distant second. China does not show up as a meaningful direct counterparty in either year, which I will admit somewhat surprised me given Xinjiang smelter proximity to the southern Kazakh wellfields. The bulk of Kazatomprom's acid still comes from domestic Kazakh non-ferrous smelting by-product, but the marginal ton, which is the ton that determines whether production hits guidance or misses it, is increasingly the imported Russian ton, and especially so if preference is given to the food and fertilizer sector of the country instead of the uranium production sector, which is important to take into account as well. There is also a reflexive element worth flagging. Kazakhstan is itself a massive sulphur exporter from Tengiz and Karachaganak and in a normal year those raw sulphur volumes flow out to places like Morocco and China where they get burned into acid. If Chinese and Gulf acid flows get choked, the logical response is for Kazakhstan to redirect more of its own sulphur into domestic acid burners, and that is exactly what the TQZ plant in Turkestan is designed to do. The proverbial problem, at least in my opinion, is timing. TQZ does not come online until the first quarter of 2027, and the Chinese ban potentially lands in May 2026 (and who knows, other countries could follow), which leaves roughly nine to twelve months, but does that mean they are in trouble? No, I don't think so, as they have previously noted that their requirements for sulphuric acid for this year have been met. Whether you take that at face value or not is a different question of course. My conclusion from looking at the available data is that Kazatomprom's direct exposure to Chinese sulphuric acid is minimal and that overall I do not expect this to have any material impact on their supply in the near term, at least not in the traditional sense. It's worth noting though that the real transmission mechanism runs indirectly through regional price contagion, because when China pulls its export volumes out of the market, Russian and Uzbek sellers gain leverage on the marginal tons heading south. Layer in the aforementioned Gulf sulphur feedstock squeeze and Kashagan export constraints, and Kazatomprom's C1 cost line (and the need for more domestic supply) likely keeps climbing into a 2027 TQZ fix that cannot arrive soon enough. Overall though, I would temper expectations that Kazatomprom is going to struggle due to this development, if it even ends up taking place of course. TLDR: no, it more than likely won't have a massive impact on Kazakhstan uranium production

@quakes99 Cheers John!

Thanks Mart! New report on Market Implications of China's Sulphuric Acid Export Ban from Red Cloud today... redcloudresearch.com/wp-content/upl…

@Democraticus13 Will probably do that for the next report on Wednesday on the Codex

@Yellowbull11 Now consider looking into Copper Consequences - when you have time

@CeceCece416 Indeed, but a weekend spent productively

@Yellowbull11 Incredible amount of work in this write up!!

In the scenario that a ceasefire even lasts, it's not the only part of the global energy market equation that needs to be taken into account, because over the course of the past month a lot of oil & gas infrastructure has been taking a beating. How much of a beating? I spent an unhealthy amount of time to get you all a detailed overview and strap in (for those who have already read this, thank you for the support and I just wanted to share it in straight post form rather than article form), because it's a lot of data and let me walk through what has actually been broken since this entire conflict kicked off and how long it will take to fix. Again it took me a lot of time to put this together and the list is long and the timelines are not flattering. The single most consequential strike of the entire war, in my view, was the March 18 and 19 missile attack on QatarEnergy's Ras Laffan Industrial City. Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, the QatarEnergy CEO, came out and confirmed that LNG Trains 4 and 6, totaling 12.8 million tons per annum of liquefaction capacity, were damaged. Train 4 is the joint venture with ExxonMobil at 66/34, and Train 6 is the joint venture with Exxon at 70/30. Together they represent approximately 17 percent of Qatar's LNG exports, or roughly 10 percent of global LNG supply once you account for Qatar's share of the seaborne market. Al-Kaabi said the repairs will take between three and five years and that QatarEnergy will be compelled to declare force majeure on long-term contracts to China, South Korea, Italy, and Belgium for up to five years. The lost annual revenue is estimated at roughly $20 billion. The associated product losses are even more underappreciated than the LNG headline. The same attack took offline 18.6 million barrels of condensate (around 24 percent of Qatar's exports), 1.281 million tons of LPG (around 13 percent), 0.594 million tons of naphtha (around 6 percent), 0.18 million tons of sulfur (around 6 percent), and 309.54 million standard cubic feet of helium (around 14 percent). The condensate loss in particular will ripple through Asian splitter economics for years, and the helium hit will be felt acutely by the semiconductor and medical imaging supply chains. There is no spare helium capacity sitting on a shelf somewhere, and the Russian projects that were supposed to backfill the global market are not running at anything close to plate capacity. The Pearl GTL facility, which is operated by Shell under a production sharing agreement and converts 1.6 billion cubic feet per day of feed gas into 140,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of cleaner-burning synthetic fuels, base oils, and waxes, was hit in the same window. Train 1 escaped damage I believe, but Train 2 will be offline for at minimum a year per Shell's own statement, and the open question that I think the market is missing is whether the eight Air Separation Units (ASUs) built by Linde at Schalchen and Dalian are intact or whether the brazed aluminum plate-fin heat exchangers at the core of those cold boxes were destroyed. If the BAHX modules took critical damage, the lead time on replacements is three to four years from contract award through commissioning, given the engineering precision and manufacturing constraints involved. Shell's one-year estimate suggests the cores are probably intact, and that is the more optimistic scenario, but I would not consider that question settled until satellite imagery and an independent assessment confirm it. Moving down the western side of the Gulf, Habshan is the part of this that I think few outside the gas market is paying attention to yet and it is the part I would personally watch closely over the coming weeks. Please correct me if I got some of the details wrong here, but I believe that the complex comprises five separate processing plants with a combined nameplate capacity of 6.1 billion standard cubic feet per day, which makes it not only the largest gas processing facility in the UAE but one of the largest in the entire Middle East. ADNOC suspended the entire complex around the start of April after the strike, and the fact that they shut down all five plants rather than just the affected one is, in my reading, a strong signal that the damage was meaningful enough to require an integrated safety review. If I assume that one of the five plants took a direct hit and that ADNOC restarts the other four within a few weeks once they have done their assessment, the sustained loss is roughly 1.2 bcf/d for the duration of the repair on the affected plant. If two plants are involved (which I would not rule out), that doubles to roughly 2.4 bcf/d. Either of these numbers is in the same league as the Qatari LNG hit, and the cascading effects matter even more here because Habshan supplies the gas that runs the UAE's power and desalination grid, the feedstock for the Ruwais petrochemical complex, and the input for several adjacent gas-to-liquids and ammonia plants. A clean repair of a single damaged train at a sour gas plant typically runs 9 to 18 months. A repair that involves the amine sweetening units, the sulfur recovery units, or the cryogenic NGL recovery columns runs 18 to 30 months. I would put my central case at roughly 12 to 24 months for full restoration and would not be shocked by longer. In boe/d terms, the central case sustained loss from Habshan is somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 400,000 boe/d for the better part of two years. Moving on, Ruwais has 922,000 barrels per day of crude and condensate processing capacity, which makes it the fourth-largest single-site refinery in the world. The aforementioned March 10 drone strike already closed the facility once and the April 5 incident with multiple fires from intercepted debris hit it again before it had fully stabilized. The complex includes Ruwais West (417,000 bpd) and Ruwais East (505,000 bpd), and it houses the world's largest residue catalytic cracking unit at 127,000 bpd of heavy residue upgrading capacity, plus a hydrocracker, a delayed coker, an aromatics complex, and a base oils plant. The product slate covers gasoline, diesel, naphtha, jet, LPG, propylene, and specialty products like calcined coke and carbon black. Quantifying Ruwais is harder than Qatar because ADNOC has not given a damage statement, but my read of the situation is that the facility has been operating at significantly reduced throughput since March and that the April fires likely impaired specific process units rather than taking down the whole refinery permanently. A central case in my view is somewhere around 300,000 to 500,000 bpd of impaired throughput for the next 6 to 12 months, with full restoration probably another 6 months on top depending on what specific units were affected. The propylene supply chain is the part to keep an eye on, because Ruwais provides the feedstock for the Borouge polyolefins complex right next door, and a Ruwais slowdown alone is enough to throttle Borouge regardless of whether Borouge itself is operational. Borouge, after the merger with OMV's Borealis to form Borouge International, runs at roughly 4.5 million tons per annum of polyolefin and olefin production. Operations at the entire complex were suspended on April 5 after the multiple fires (seeing a theme here), and in petrochemicals a fire that triggers a full unsplanned shutdown is rarely the kind of thing you restart in a week. Polyolefin train repairs typically run 6 to 18 months for moderate damage and longer for cracker damage, so I would put the realistic Borouge outage at somewhere between 9 and 18 months for whatever portion of the 4.5 mtpa took the hit. If half the complex is affected, that is roughly 2.25 mtpa of polyolefins gone from the market for the better part of a year and a half, which the global packaging and infrastructure plastics chains will feel all the way down to consumer prices. The Saudi situation is, by comparison, mild (if one could describe anything in this situation mild to begin with). Ras Tanura's 550,000 bpd processing capacity took an early-war hit and restarted, so the sustained loss there is essentially a few weeks of throughput, call it 5 to 10 million barrels of product over the outage window rather than a multi-year structural problem. SAMREF Yanbu is reported as minimal damage. The bigger Saudi problem is not damage to the refineries, in my view, but the throughput constraint on the East-West pipeline, which has a nameplate capacity of about 5 million bpd but has been running well below that as the country scrambles to redirect Gulf-bound exports overland to Yanbu. Bahrain is in worse shape it would seem. The Bapco Energies refinery at 400,000 bpd is in force majeure, and the Sitra storage and petrochemical complex was hit on a separate occasion. Sitra is a particularly painful target for Bahrain because, from what I can tell, roughly 80 percent of the country's total oil exports are refined products from that single facility, which means a structural Sitra outage is essentially an export crisis for the country. My base case is that Bapco's 400,000 bpd is impaired for 6 to 12 months, with significant uncertainty around what specifically was damaged. In boe/d terms that is the better part of a third of a million barrels per day of refined product outflow lost. Kuwait has had Mina Al-Ahmadi (346,000 bpd) and Mina Abdullah (roughly 454,000 bpd) hit in repeated waves since March 19, with the most recent strike on Mina Al-Ahmadi happening on April 3. KPC declared force majeure on delivery contracts last month. My central estimate is that Kuwait is running its refining system at somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of normal throughput, which translates to a sustained loss of roughly 240,000 to 400,000 bpd of refining capacity for at least 6 months, and probably longer given that the strikes have been recurring rather than one-and-done. Iraq's Lanaz refinery in Erbil is small at roughly 30,000 bpd, so the direct refining loss is rounding error. The bigger Iraq story is the upstream production shut-in driven by the Strait closure, which I covered yesterday, and which is well over 4 million bpd on its own. What about IRN itself? Because they certainly need to be included in this picture as well. IRN's downstream is feedstock-starved rather than physically destroyed in most cases, which is an important distinction. The Bandar Abbas refinery at 320,000 bpd of crude and condensate processing capacity is running below nameplate because Kharg-linked feedstock flows have been disrupted. Persian Gulf Star, the largest condensate splitter in the world at roughly 360,000 bpd, is running below capacity for the same reason. The Shahran depot near the capital was hit early in the war and is essentially gone. The South Pars strikes on March 18 took some processing units offline at what is, by some distance, their most important gas asset, and the more recent strikes on power infrastructure at South Pars are the kind of thing that compounds over weeks rather than days I think. Putting numbers on the South Pars hit is harder because their disclosure on damage is unreliable, but the field accounts for roughly 70 to 80 percent of national gas production, which in raw terms is somewhere around 600 to 730 million cubic meters per day depending on which year you reference. If even 10 percent of that processing capacity is offline for repair, that is 60 to 73 mmcm/d, or roughly 2.1 to 2.6 bcf/d of gas equivalent. Most of this is consumed domestically rather than exported, so the global market impact is muted, but the knock-on effect on their power generation, petrochemical feedstock, and reinjection into aging oilfields is significant for their production over a 12 to 24 month horizon. Replacement timeline for damaged compressor stations and processing modules at South Pars is, in my view, 12 to 24 months under sanctions, and longer if the equipment requires Western suppliers who cannot legally provide it. The single most important fact about their energy picture, which I touched on earlier and want to repeat here because it really matters for the global supply outlook, is that Kharg Island is intact. The Pentagon has confirmed it. State media has confirmed it. Tankers are still moored there from what I can tell. If and when the Strait reopens, their 1.5 to 1.7 million bpd of crude exports can theoretically restart almost immediately, and the 90-plus percent of those exports that go to CHN teapot refineries on heavily discounted terms will be the first barrels back into the system. This is, paradoxically, one of the few stabilizing factors in the entire picture. When I add it all together, what I get is roughly the following picture for sustained energy supply removed from the global market for at least the next 12 months, and in many cases much longer. On the gas side, somewhere between 4 and 6 bcf/d of effective processing or liquefaction capacity is offline. Qatar accounts for roughly 1.7 bcf/d of LNG-equivalent for three to five years. Habshan accounts for somewhere between 1.2 and 2.4 bcf/d for 12 to 24 months. South Pars accounts for an additional 2 to 3 bcf/d for 12 to 24 months, though most of that is domestic consumption rather than global export. In LNG market terms specifically, the loss is roughly 12.8 mtpa for years, which is about 10 percent of global LNG trade and the single largest supply shock that market has ever experienced. European TTF and Asian JKM benchmarks were already pricing this in before the ceasefire, and I see no path for them to fully unwind even if Hormuz reopens cleanly tomorrow, because the Qatari capacity is physically destroyed regardless of what the headlines say. On the refining side, my central estimate of sustained capacity impairment is somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 2.0 million barrels per day for the next 6 to 12 months, with a longer tail at lower volumes. Ruwais alone accounts for 300,000 to 500,000 bpd. Bapco accounts for 400,000 bpd. Kuwait's two damaged refineries account for another 240,000 to 400,000 bpd. Bandar Abbas, Persian Gulf Star, and miscellaneous smaller facilities round it out. Replacement timeline for the bulk of this damage is 6 to 18 months for moderate cases and 18 to 36 months for the more serious ones. Refinery margins, in my view, are going to compress hard from the input side for the rest of the year as the system struggles to balance, and the global jet fuel and middle distillate markets specifically are going to feel this acutely. The IATA chief was in my opinion exactly right when he said jet fuel will take months to normalize even after Hormuz reopens. On the petrochemical side, somewhere between 5 and 7 mtpa of polyolefin and olefin capacity is offline for 9 to 18 months, between Borouge, Pearl GTL Train 2, Sitra in Bahrain, and Shuaiba in Kuwait. This is the part of the damage that is going to bleed slowly into global plastics, packaging, automotive, and construction supply chains over the next year, and it is the part that I do not think anyone outside of specialist chemical analysts or other associated analysts is even tracking yet. On the associated liquids side, the 106,000 bpd of Qatari condensate, LPG, and naphtha that is gone for three to five years adds an additional structural deficit at the light end of the barrel that will be felt in Asian splitter economics specifically. China and South Korea are the most exposed. If I collapse all of this into a single number for the headline before I collapse myself after going through all these numbers for god knows how long and if that's even possible and who knows this entire report could become outdated the moment it is released, the sustained energy supply impairment from infrastructure damage alone (setting aside the Strait closure entirely, which is a separate and larger issue that I have already discussed at length to the extend you can't even call it a broken record anymore, but rather a destroyed record at the very least) is somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 2.0 million boe/d on a sustained 12-month basis, with a tail of roughly 0.5 million boe/d that persists for 3 to 5 years until the full force of Qatari LNG capacity comes back. That is the floor under what the global system has lost and even though it may seem like it, it is not a small number, although it could of course have been higher. The replacement cost for all of this, if I had to put a rough dollar figure on it, which is very very difficult to do so I would take this with a container of salt (as I would the rest of this report given that there is still a lot of uncertainty) runs into the high tens of billions and probably crosses $100 billion once you account for the LNG trains, the Pearl GTL train, the Habshan modules, the Borouge complex, the multiple refinery units, and the associated downtime costs. Shell paid $18 to $19 billion to build Pearl GTL in the first place, and that was at 2006 prices for a project that took the better part of a decade to design and execute. The original EPC contract for the eight ASUs at Pearl alone was $800 million to $1 billion in 2006 dollars, and replacement cost today, even assuming Linde could deliver them in a hurry, would be substantially higher. Time for a conclusion and if you made it this far, congrats as that was a lot of data to get through. As you all know I have been writing a lot on this conflict and positioning accordingly over at the Codex (link in bio), to the tune of 17 seperate macro updates, two extra newsletters of 10+ pages and two more newsletters clocking in at around ~70 pages over just the past month, which I hope will have helped get through this macro storm we have seen and in today's update I will also further discuss positioning, but that can be found on the Codex and I hope to see you there. Now, where does this all leave us? The way I see it, this is the structural floor under oil, gas, refined products, and petrochemicals for at least the next year. It remains to be seen how the market will end up settling in, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it and work with the numbers we got right now. Anyone modeling a quick return to pre-conflict prices is, in my opinion, ignoring this entire physical infrastructure layer of the picture. The proverbial damage really is, as I wrote before as well, measured in months to years rather than weeks, and now that I have actually run the numbers I am still a bit concerned about that. Again, how the market will eventually price all this remains to be seen, but the picture is not as black and white as 'ceasefire or no ceasefire equates to full flows or no flows' and it's important to remember that as we move into the next phase of these developments. Thank you for reading and I hope you have a good and health rest of your day!

@Uzocapital @marketplunger1 Been spending the weekend on this subject (I know, very exciting way to spend one's weekend), will have some thoughts posted in the afternoon as I finish that up

@marketplunger1 uranium?…the kazakhs need thst acid

Alright so this just got VERY interesting for copper and nickel production going forward.

Who is ready for another volatile week? The macro rollercoaster keeps going

@Mick_Spic You'd be surprised how much investors and the market in general are underestimating this

If the Strait stays closed for another two months, asset classes across the board will get smoked

@YellowFocus And thank you Leslie!

@Yellowbull11 Amazing work here... thank you sir!

@oneatom1201 Thank you my friend!

@Yellowbull11 Mart, you are amazing.