Inside today’s Daily Journal…

The production of liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) in the Middle East has been decimated by the war in Iran… creating a huge opportunity for those LNG producers outside the region and one U.S. global exporter in particular.

Over the weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants – with Iran threatening massive retaliation if that happened. This morning, Trump walked back the threats… for now. But Iran’s strikes over the past weeks and the threats of a wider escalation of this conflict have caused many energy companies in the region to cease or slow production.

Iran’s retaliatory strikes against production facilities in Qatar have caused the second-leading supplier globally to completely shut down production. QatarEnergy’s CEO estimates it will take three to five years to repair the damage to its Ras Laffan facility – its largest production and export hub. Producers in Abu Dhabi, the UAE, and other nations have greatly scaled back their production and delivery as well.

While this massive disruption to the energy supply in a key region of the world will have a devastating impact on the global economy for months (and years) to come, there is one winner. And it’s a company we have been writing about for more than a year, and whose stock we recommended to Complete Investor subscribers in February 2025. Shares are up 134% year to date, and we feel there is more upside to go.

The company is Venture Global (VG), based in Arlington, Virginia.

When Michael Sabel and Robert Pender founded Venture Global in 2013, their vision for the company was based on a simple, yet bold proposal: to build LNG projects “faster, cheaper, and better than anyone else.” And they have done exactly that.

The traditional industry approach to building LNG terminals is based on the “stick-built” method, which involves manufacturing customized structures on site. This requires relocating and housing hundreds of skilled construction workers and engineers, and building, from the ground up, one or several large-scale liquefaction trains – the workhorses of an LNG terminal used to supercool and compress natural gas into LNG. Given the high degree of customization, this method inevitably experiences operational setbacks and project delays.

Instead of following this practice, Venture Global pioneered an approach that uses smaller liquefaction trains – named trains because the process of liquefying natural gas involves a series of sequential steps, similar to the connected carriages of a railroad train – pre-built in offsite facilities and shipped directly to the project site. The result is more of a “plug and play” approach to LNG terminal building, where the hard work of building the most critical element of the project – the liquefaction train – is already completed beforehand, and offsite. Thus, the only work left to do is set up the supporting infrastructure (power generation, pipeline connections, etc.) and put all the pieces together.

The company calls this the “design one, build many” approach – this makes Venture Global’s construction process highly scalable and repeatable, instead of starting each new project from the ground up with a new customized design.