When you buy a natural gas stock, you are not really buying natural gas. You are buying a business that lives and dies by the price of gas, and the way each kind of business feels that price is very different. That difference matters more than most investors realize, and it sits at the center of the thesis Porter Stansberry lays out in his Boston Blackout presentation.
Stansberry’s argument is straightforward. Natural gas already supplies more than 40% of the electricity generated in the United States, and it is the fastest form of baseload power to add when demand jumps. Nuclear plants take a decade or more to permit and build. A gas turbine can be ordered and operating in a couple of years. So when AI data centers start demanding enormous amounts of new power, the fuel most likely to meet them first is natural gas.
The math he cites is eye catching. The United States produces roughly 105 to 110 billion cubic feet per day of dry natural gas. The presentation points to a projected 50 Bcf/d of incremental demand from data centers. That is nearly a 50% expansion in consumption against a supply base that is not growing quickly. The domestic rig count sits at multi-year lows, and the best drillers have consolidated into a smaller number of companies. Tighter supply meeting rising demand is the entire bull case in one sentence.
But “natural gas stocks” is not one thing. It is several very different businesses wearing the same label, and each one captures gas price exposure differently.
First, the producers. These are companies like EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, which Stansberry calls his “Gods of Gas” pick. A producer’s earnings move almost one-for-one with the price of the gas it sells. When gas prices rise, every additional dollar of revenue flows straight to the bottom line. When prices fall, the pain is just as direct. Producers carry the most price sensitivity of any group, for better and worse.
Second, the LNG exporters. Venture Global (VG) is the headline name here. The company only went public in January 2025 and has already grown to a market capitalization of roughly $35.5 billion. Venture Global liquefies American gas and ships it to buyers overseas, mostly in Europe and Asia, where prices have historically run well above domestic Henry Hub levels. Its economics are less about the daily spot price of gas and more about the spread between cheap American supply and expensive global demand. Revenue grew about 59% year over year, and EBITDA margins run above 45%. Cheniere Energy plays a similar role with a more mature, contract-heavy model.
Third, the mineral rights and royalty companies. Viper Energy sits here. These businesses own royalties on acreage that other operators drill. They collect a share of production without paying drilling costs, which makes them the capital-light way to play gas output. When the Permian Basin’s associated gas gets produced, Viper gets paid regardless of whether the operator that drilled the well is profitable.
Fourth, the pipeline and midstream companies. These are the toll roads. They get paid to move gas, mostly under long-term contracts, so they care less about price and more about volume and utilization. They are the steadiest, lowest-octane corner of the sector.
Stansberry’s three picks map neatly onto three of these segments. EQT is the producer, Venture Global is the exporter, and Viper is the royalty play. They carry different risk profiles and different degrees of price sensitivity, but they share one macro assumption: demand for American natural gas is about to outrun supply.
That assumption is worth examining honestly rather than accepting at face value. The counterargument is that the Permian Basin now produces enormous volumes of associated gas, which comes up alongside oil whether anyone wants it or not. Producers that once flared that gas now capture and sell it. If that flood of supply reaches the market, it can create a national glut even while New England, cut off by blocked pipelines from Pennsylvania shale, stays tight and leans on LNG imported through Boston Harbor. The Boston Blackout hook recycles a fear that first circulated in the summer of 2022, and the winter deadline in the presentation is a marketing frame rather than a hard catalyst.
None of that means the thesis is wrong. It means the right way to approach these stocks is to understand which segment you are actually buying. We compare the leading names in more depth in our best natural gas stocks explainer, and we walk through the ETF and futures mechanics separately. The royalty model, which Stansberry has championed before, gets its own treatment in our royalty riches coverage.
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