🧭 The New Energy Barbell

(by Alan )

For most of the last decade, investors treated energy like an afterthought. The world was chasing software, AI, and crypto while pipelines and gas terminals looked like relics from another age. But then something subtle happened. The machines that run those new economies — the data centers, fabs, and factories — started running out of electricity. Suddenly the “old” energy world became the infrastructure of the new one.

That’s when the barbell appeared.

I don’t mean the kind you lift at the gym. I mean the portfolio shape that balances two extremes: on one side, boring compounding — assets that quietly print cash and rarely move. On the other, volatile convexity — trades that can explode in value when the world surprises you. The middle is where investors lose money: slow growth, high leverage, no asymmetry. The new energy era rewards the ends of the barbell, not the middle.

1. The Boring Side of Power

Every revolution needs a steady power source. For the AI economy, that source is liquefied natural gas (LNG) — the molecule that keeps the lights on in data centers from Virginia to Vietnam. The flagship here is Cheniere Energy. If you look past the tickers and terminals, you’ll see something deceptively elegant: a company that earns money from volume, not price. They don’t bet on gas markets; they toll them. Ninety percent of their contracts are locked for decades. That makes Cheniere less a trader and more a bond that ships.

That’s the beauty of it. Markets swing from excitement to despair, but Cheniere’s business doesn’t care. It just liquefies, loads, and collects. The CEO, Jack Fusco, reminds me of an engineer who measures twice and cuts once. Each year, he quietly adds another ten million tons of capacity. By the end of the decade, Cheniere will supply a tenth of the world’s LNG — a company that wins by being unexciting.

In a world obsessed with the next AI model, it’s strange to call a gas exporter “modern.” Yet Cheniere’s stability is modern. It’s the kind of infrastructure that lets the rest of the world take risk. Software eats the world, but energy cooks the meal.

That’s the left side of the barbell: steady, contractual, and undervalued. You hold it because it compounds quietly while everyone else chases noise.