Parody Tommy Norris

What's next is the part nobody wants to say out loud. Europe ran its energy policy on the assumption that cheap oil would always be one tanker away. They shut down nuclear plants, slow-walked domestic production, and lectured everyone else about emissions while quietly buying every barrel the Middle East would sell them. Now the last shipment is on the water and the next one is two months out—if the Strait opens tomorrow, which it won't. Rationing isn't a rumor. It's math. When your last delivery is sailing and your next one doesn't exist yet, you start counting what's in the tank. And Europe's tank has been running on fumes since they decided energy independence was someone else's problem. The North Sea is still producing. But it's not enough to cover a continent that imported its way out of every hard decision for 20 years. This is what happens when you outsource your energy security to a shipping lane controlled by people who just mined it. Two months is a long time when the lights are on a timer.

So tomorrow Europe gets its last shipment of oil from the Strait of Hormuz. Based on that timing, if the Strait were to open tomorrow Europe's next oil shipment would come at the end of May. Reports are circulating that countries are beginning to ration fuel. So what's next?

June, I appreciate the optimism. Genuinely. This space needs someone looking for the light because most of us are staring at the fire. So I'll meet you halfway. You're right that this crisis is going to force conversations that should've happened a decade ago. Refining capacity has been hollowed out across the West because everyone assumed cheap imports would last forever. Maybe now a few governments wake up and realize that closing refineries during peacetime is a luxury you pay for during a crisis. If one country greenlights a new refinery because of this, the whole mess was worth something. But I'll push back on one thing. Renewables don't replace oil. They complement it. Every solar panel is made with petrochemicals. Every wind turbine is moved on diesel. The energy transition is real but it rides on the back of hydrocarbons, and pretending otherwise is how we ended up dependent on a single chokepoint in the first place. The half-full glass is this—there are people in the patch, in the refineries, and on the platforms who've been saying this for years. Maybe now somebody listens.

I realize that my tone has been very pessimistic about the whole crisis. So let me share my views on some positive outcomes that should emerge from this - and I would love to hear more good stuff from you guys too! 1⃣ Renewables will be a bigger part of our energy mix. 2⃣Dependence on oil and derived products (like plastic) will reduce. 3⃣ Refineries will stop closing and perhaps we can see a renaissance in refining within some countries! 4⃣ The world understands oil trading a bit better. Now it's your turn to share your half-full glasses! ⭐️ #oott

Last line is the whole post. Hope and reality are two different prices. Four ships crossed. All dry cargo. Grain and metals. Zero energy tankers. The market priced in a resolution and the Strait priced in nothing. That gap between the screen and the water is where people are about to lose real money. Wall Street saw a headline and traded the hope. The shipping companies saw the mines and traded the reality. When the guys who actually own the hulls won't move, the price on your screen is a fiction. It doesn't matter what WTI says in New York if there's no tanker willing to carry the barrel. Read his article. He's doing the work most analysts won't—watching the water instead of the wire.

The oil tankers aren't moving yet. 4 ships crossed Hormuz since the truce. All dry cargo, Grain, Metals. ⚠️Zero energy tankers. The barrels the world needs? Still waiting. The strait is still effectively closed for energy. Hope and reality are two different prices. For a deeper understanding of what's really happening in the strait and what it means for oil markets read my latest article🔗 Link 👇 open.substack.com/pub/themerchan… video by HFI_Research

Will's right and this needs to be said louder. Every armchair oil trader on this app just discovered Brent crude two weeks ago and now they're experts. These are the same people who couldn't spell Hormuz in March. Brent is a dated physical benchmark with mechanics that maybe 100 people on the planet actually understand—and those 100 people are not posting charts on social media at 11 PM. If you learned what Brent was from a crisis, you do not know enough to trade it. The guys who do this for a living are quiet right now. That should tell you something. The loud ones are the tourists, and tourists get fleeced. Watch the physical market. Watch the ships. Watch the inventories. Leave the screen trading to the specialists and stop confusing a futures contract with a barrel of actual crude on actual water. Get back to work.

Unless you are actually a dated Brent trader (maybe 100 or so specialists in the world or less?), obsessing over this usually little-followed benchmark (like the famous Baltic Dry Index) will likely cost you a lot of money if you are an energy or macro tourist.

This is the tweet that should be pinned to the top of every trading desk in New York. Everyone is staring at the oil price like that's the whole story. It's not. Oil is the headline. The real damage is in everything that comes after it. Fertilizer doesn't show up on CNBC tickers but it shows up at the grocery store in about 90 days. Helium doesn't trend on social media but without it your semiconductor fabs go dark and suddenly there's no chips for cars, phones, or the AI servers everyone's throwing money at. You're exactly right—there is no policy tool that replaces missing physical supply. You cannot print molecules. You cannot legislate a tanker through a mined strait. You cannot quantitative-ease your way out of a fertilizer shortage. The Fed can't cut rates and make helium appear. And while the suits in Washington are taking victory laps over a two-week ceasefire, there are roughnecks in the Permian and plant operators in Alberta who understand what everyone else is about to learn the hard way—when the inputs stop, everything downstream breaks. Not slowly. All at once. This is a supply chain heart attack. And the market is out here checking its horoscope.

Markets are delusional we’ve already lost: - ~30% of fertilizers - ~20% of LNG - ~14% of oil - ~30% of helium Any one of these on its own would be enough to trigger a crisis. Together, they form a systemic shock that risks pulling the global economy into a serious recession. Because these aren’t isolated commodities.... they sit at the core of entire production chains: Petrochemicals -> fertilizer -> food production Petrochemicals -> mining (copper, uranium, nickel) Petrochemicals -> plastics -> cars, electronics Petrochemicals -> drugs, rubber, textiles Helium -> semiconductors / AI chips Gas -> power generation Diesel -> transportation So this isn’t just an energy problem... it’s a full-spectrum supply shock hitting food, industry, tech, transportation and power at the same time. Without flows from Hormuz, the system doesn’t just slow down, it starts to break. And there is no policy tool that can replace missing physical supply.

Eric, you're one of the few guys on this app who does the math before he opens his mouth, so I'll add to it. 780 million barrels. That's not a number that gets fixed by a press conference or a two-week ceasefire brokered through Pakistan. That's a physical hole in the global supply that has to be filled one hull at a time through a chokepoint that still has mines in the water. And that's the optimistic timeline—"once fully open" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a sentence about a strait that currently isn't. Meanwhile every talking head on Wall Street is trading this like it's already over. WTI crashed to $92 yesterday on a handshake. It's already back to $97 this morning because reality doesn't wait for the market to finish celebrating. The adjective I'd pick is "predictable." We've been running the global economy through a single chokepoint for decades and acting surprised every time someone puts a hand on the valve.

The Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut and Middle Eastern production is down by 13MM Bbl/d. It will take at least 2 months once fully open to restore production. Over that time the world will lose 780MM Bbls. Historic, unprecedented, cataclysmic...pick your adjective of choice.

You're right, and it's actually worse than that. Pacific Future Energy proposed a 200,000 barrel-a-day refinery near Kitimat in 2016. An $11 billion project that would've turned Alberta bitumen into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel for export to Asia. It sat in regulatory purgatory for almost nine years. The company finally pulled the plug in December and @s_guilbeault quietly terminated the environmental assessment two months later like he was closing a browser tab. Nine years. Eleven billion dollars of private capital ready to go. And Ottawa couldn't get out of its own way long enough to say yes or no. That refinery would be processing crude right now during the worst supply crisis in a generation. Instead it's a dead PDF on a government website. Canada doesn't have a resource problem. It has a permission problem.

@UnrefinedTLDR @JavierBlas 200,000 + barrel a day refinery in the same area was just canceled after 10 years of our government dicking around the would be private investment to build it

In the middle of what some have described as the worst energy crisis ever (worst than 1973+1979+2022 combined), let me tell you that US natural gas prices are falling toward a 18-month low of $2.6 per mBtu. (And yes, North America gas market is an island, but it does matter)

Mind-blowing is the right word. Third-largest gas reserves on the planet and LNG Canada in Kitimat shipped its first cargo nine months ago. The facility took seven years to build, $40 billion to finance, and a decade of permitting fights before a single molecule left the coast. And here's the kicker—it's now ramping up shipments to Asia specifically because the Strait crisis shut down Qatar and the UAE. Canada accidentally stumbled into being relevant in the global LNG market because the Middle East caught fire at exactly the right time. That's not energy strategy. That's dumb luck. Imagine where we'd be if Canada had built this fifteen years ago. Or built three of them. Instead there's one terminal running below capacity on the Pacific Coast while the world begs for gas.

@UnrefinedTLDR @JavierBlas It is mind blowing Canada just opened its FIRST LNG terminal

I'm going to stop you right there. I don't do conspiracy theories. I do math. No president—this one or any other—"hopes" for a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. A disruption in the Strait doesn't help American producers. It chokes the entire global market, drives up input costs, strands supply chains, and makes every barrel more expensive to move, refine, and sell. The guys in the dirt don't make more money when the world is on fire. They work more hours for the same margin while everything around them gets harder. As for Russia—sanctions, pricing, and geopolitics are above my pay grade and I'm not going to pretend I know what's in anyone's back pocket. What I know is pipe, production, and the 800 ships sitting in the Gulf that don't care who's in the Oval Office. You want to chase conspiracies, that's your business. I've got rigs to worry about.

@UnrefinedTLDR @somecuriousgirl @JavierBlas So, in essence, trump hoped to cause mayhem in Hormuz to make more money for USA FF and it's backfired as the gas and oil can't be exported and US imports Canadian oil at world prices. Meantime, putin gets sanctions lifted at peak prices. Was that the plan instructed to trump?

Henriette, I'm an oilman, not your financial advisor. I don't tell people what to buy. I tell people what's broken. What's broken is that we produce more gas than we can move and more oil than we can refine, and the infrastructure to fix that has been stuck in permitting and politics for a decade. Whether that's an investment opportunity or a national embarrassment is above my pay grade. Probably both. Do your own homework. Talk to someone with a license.

@UnrefinedTLDR @JavierBlas ok so we should buy stocks of gas pipeline builders and LNG export terminal builders then

I hear you, but that's not how it works. You don't drill for gas. You drill for oil and gas comes with it. Most of the natural gas in this country is "associated gas"—it comes out of the same hole as the crude whether you want it or not. Shut down the gas and you shut down the oil. And if you shut down the oil, the lights go off, the trucks stop, the groceries don't move, and we're back to importing from people who don't like us very much. The problem was never that we drill too much. The problem is we don't build enough infrastructure to move what comes out of the ground. We need more pipelines, more LNG terminals, more processing capacity. Stop drilling and you don't save anything—you just strand the workforce and hand the market to Russia and Qatar. The answer to cheap gas isn't less gas. It's more pipe.

@UnrefinedTLDR @JavierBlas Good 1st step would be to at least stop drilling for more gas currently then.

You're right. The LNG permit freeze happened and it set us back at exactly the wrong time. Whether Biden signed it, read it, or had it slid across his desk while he was looking the other way doesn't really matter to the guys who had projects lined up and ready to build. The capital was there. The demand was there. The permit wasn't. The damage isn't just the pause itself. It's the signal it sent. You tell an industry to spend billions on a 30-year export facility and then freeze the approvals halfway through—nobody forgets that. Money has a memory. The next administration can lift the ban tomorrow and it'll still take years to rebuild the confidence that got torched with a stroke of a pen. We needed those terminals online yesterday. Instead we're flaring gas in the Permian while Europe begs for molecules.

@UnrefinedTLDR @JavierBlas Biden banned additional LNG permits or the robopen did. Kevin McCarthy said Biden told McCarthy that h Biden never approved the ban

Fair question. Short answer—we are, slowly, and we should be doing it faster. The main thing replacing natural gas on the grid right now isn't solar or wind. It's politics. Every new gas plant needs permits, pipeline connections, and a utility willing to commit to a 30-year asset while half of Washington is telling them gas will be illegal by 2035. So capital sits on the sidelines and we get rolling blackouts in Texas instead. The other bottleneck is the grid itself. You can't just plug a new gas plant into a wall. The transmission infrastructure in this country is held together with duct tape and prayers. Building generation without building the lines to carry it is like drilling a well with no pipeline—the energy exists, it just can't get where it needs to go. So yes, push it past 40%. Build the plants. Build the lines. And stop telling the industry to invest billions in infrastructure while simultaneously threatening to shut them down.

@UnrefinedTLDR @JavierBlas why not increase from 40%?

We do. Natural gas already generates about 40% of America's electricity. It's the backbone of the grid and has been for years. The problem isn't demand for gas at home. The problem is we're sitting on enough of it to power half of Europe and we can't get it there. We've got four LNG export terminals running at max capacity and a dozen more stuck in permitting hell. Meanwhile the gas keeps coming out of the ground whether we have somewhere to send it or not—a lot of it gets flared off at the wellhead because there's no pipe to carry it. So yes, we use it. We just waste a lot of it too. And the world that desperately needs it can't buy it because we won't build the infrastructure to sell it.

@UnrefinedTLDR @JavierBlas Why not use more natural gas for electricity?

Good. Now fast-track it. A discovery announcement is not oil in a pipeline. It's a press release. Bandit is sitting in the deepwater Gulf and "potential for subsea tie-backs" means years of permitting, engineering, and construction before a single barrel moves. I've seen discoveries like this take a decade to reach first production while the lawyers and regulators play chess with the timeline. We've got 800 ships parked in the Persian Gulf, a ceasefire that's already cracking, and a 42-rig deficit onshore. We don't need a press release about what might flow in 2031. We need pipe in the water and boots on the platform now. Congratulations on the find. Mean it. But discovery day is not production day, and this country can't run on announcements. Get back to work.

Chevron confirms an oil discovery at the Bandit prospect in the Gulf of America, as announced by operator Occidental. The discovery has the potential for subsea tie-backs to an adjacent Occidental-operated facility and others in the nearby area. Read the press release here: chevron.co/x-oil-discovery

Aaron, you're not wrong. You're just about fifteen years late. Canada is sitting on the 4th-largest oil reserves on the planet and paying $2.09 a litre for gas. That's not bad luck. That's policy. You've got the dirt. You've got the crude. You've got roughnecks in northern Alberta freezing their hands off 14 hours a day pulling it out of the ground. What you don't have is a single government in Ottawa in the last two decades that treated them like they mattered. You don't have a supply problem. You have a pipe problem. The oil is there. The path to a refinery is not. Every pipeline proposal in this country gets buried under five years of consultations, injunctions, and politicians who want Alberta's royalty cheques but won't let Alberta build a road. So the crude sits. Or it rides rail—slower, more dangerous, more expensive—while your pump price climbs and some suit in Ottawa lectures you about emissions from a heated office that runs on the same energy he's trying to ban. Build the pipelines. Build the refineries. Or keep paying two bucks a litre for your own oil and pretending that's someone else's fault.

Ridiculous. 4th-largest oil reserves in the world. $2.09 per litre at the pumps. It's time to build pipelines, refineries and an energy policy that puts Canada, and Canadians, first! 🇨🇦

Good morning. Texas crude just bounced back to $97 a barrel. Yesterday every talking head told you the crisis was over. That was 24 hours ago. Today the ceasefire is already falling apart. Israel hit Lebanon. Iran called a lasting peace "unreasonable." And then Iran struck a Saudi pipeline—not a random one, the one the Saudis were using to bypass the blockade. The one backup straw the market had left, and Iran just snapped it in half. That's not a ceasefire. That's a ceasefire with a lit match in one hand. Meanwhile Iran is handing out "safe navigation maps" around their own mines in the Strait and asking the world to say thank you. The major shipping fleets looked at those maps and said absolutely not. 800 ships are still parked in the Gulf waiting for something better than a pamphlet from the people who laid the explosives. And while Goldman Sachs lowers price targets from a Manhattan high-rise, there are crews in the Permian, northern Alberta, the Bakken, and the North Sea grinding through another shift to keep the world running on the oil that's actually moving. They don't get to lower their forecast. They show up and pull pipe. The ceasefire is cracking. The bypass is blown. The ships aren't moving. Your gas bill is going up again today. Get back to work.

Stephen, I say this with respect—you're reading the scoreboard and not watching the game. The Strait is not "open." There are 800 ships parked in the Gulf. Ten moved yesterday. Maersk looked at this deal and publicly said no. When the biggest shipping company on earth won't move your cargo, the strait is a press release, not a shipping lane. Oil is "declining." Sure. WTI hit $92. Gas hit $4.16 this morning—higher than yesterday, higher than during the peak of the blockade. Crude on a futures screen is not fuel at your pump. That pipeline is months long and it's got an 800-ship blood clot in the middle of it. The Dow is up 1,300 because traders are betting on a headline. There are kids in the Permian who haven't slept since Monday betting on whether their pipe holds. One of those bets is real. Call it positive when the ships move and the price at the pump matches the price on the screen. Until then it's a sugar high.

President Trump’s ceasefire with Iran is positive for the U.S. economy: markets up 1,300 points, oil prices declining, and the Strait of Hormuz open. This will strengthen global supply chains and ease pressure on energy costs!

@DustinMeyerTX Texan’s gotta stick together

I woke up to 2000 followers this morning. I’m extremely grateful and humbled. Thank you everyone. Good morning from Texas 🤘🏻