The Most Asymmetrical Opportunity In The World Today

The Most Asymmetrical Opportunity In The World Today

Continuous Innovations Will Send This Major Energy Player Higher

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Sir Lionel Luckhoo is the greatest lawyer in history.

He holds the Guinness World Record for 245 straight murder acquittals. Not in the United Kingdom. Or the United States. Not in South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand. In Guyana.

You’ve probably never thought much about Guyana. No reason why you would. Discovered by Columbus on his third voyage (1498), he didn’t bother stopping. Europeans wouldn’t arrive in any number until almost 100 years later.

It was the Dutch, not the Spaniards, who built the first colonies in this stretch of the South American jungle in 1580. For the next 200 years, the Dutch imported African slaves to turn Guyana’s hot, fetid plains into large-scale sugar plantations.

During the tumultuous Napoleonic wars, control of the territory was conceded to the British. And they – although they get no thanks for it today – ended slavery in Guyana in 1834.

To fill the resulting labor shortage, hundreds of thousands of indentured servants from India migrated to Guyana – including Sir Lionel Luckhoo’s great grandparents. His grandfather, Edward Alfred Luckhoo, was the first Indian lawyer in Guyana, admitted to the bar in 1899.

The leaders of Guyana’s drive for independence (1966) – as with most former colonies – rejected the economic system of the British Empire… in favor of socialism.

In 1970 Guyana’s Prime Minister (Forbes Burnham) declared Guyana would become the world’s first “cooperative republic.” Major industries like bauxite and sugar were brought under state control. Banks were nationalized and soon the country’s economy was subject to strict price controls.

As you know, socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money. But it doesn’t work at all if you have no money to start with. Real per-capita GDP in Guyana fell from around $600 at independence to roughly half that 20 years later. Virtually everyone who could leave the country did so. And soon Guyana was in a foot race (no one could afford shoes) with Haiti for the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

That’s when its neighbor, Suriname, thought it a good time to poach what little resources Guyana had left.

Suriname’s primary national export was aluminum . So when its bauxite mines began to run dry, it looked across the river to Guyana. Suriname argued that the Courantyne River – a border agreed on since 1831, and one that appears on all international maps – wasn’t actually the border at all. Instead, Suriname claimed the real border was an entirely different river, the New River. It conveniently sits in 6,000 square miles inside Guyana’s territory, which is indeed rich in bauxite.

It fell to Sir Lionel Luckhoo to evict the Surinamese invaders, without much to back him up. At first, he called them “illegal immigrants.”

Suriname’s Premier responded by kicking out about 2,000 Guyanese from his country, claiming that they were illegal immigrants. So Luckhoo decided to appeal to a higher authority. He flew to the Netherlands (Suriname’s parent country) to complain directly to Queen Juliana.

It didn’t help.

In August 1969 Surinam forces flew into the New River area and set up a three-square-acre military camp, complete with barracks, bunkers, field refrigerators, and a big, obnoxious flag. The Guyanese responded with “Operation Climax”: 2 De Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter planes with nose guns and 44 armed soldiers.

The battle was like two retarded kids trying to shoot each other with paint pellet guns.

The Surinamese attempted to block off the half-built landing strip with 200-liter metal oil drums, but the Guyanese landed the planes anyway. They got lucky: the propellers just cleared the top of the drums because the planes’ wings (with the propellers) are mounted on top of the roof of the plane. After a brief firefight, the Surinamese abandoned their camp (along with all their refrigerators and jeeps) and fled in boats. The Surinamese five stars flag went down. The Guyanese golden arrowhead went up.

As the Surinamese retreated from Guyana – for the time being – poor Sir Lionel Luckhoo retreated from politics and went back into law. And you’d never believe what happened next: Jim Jones hired him to handle a paternity case.

In fact, Luckhoo was supposed to be in the notorious cult leader’s camp the day Jones put cyanide into the camp’s Flavor-Aid and ordered everyone to drink it, killing 900 people including 200 children.

Luckhoo had had enough. Like virtually everyone else who could possibly afford to leave, he moved to Texas.

And the resource war between Suriname and Guyana spread to oil.

Which brings us to the point of the story…

Oil companies have been nosing around in Guyana since the 1950s, but only one well had delivered more than a trickle of the black liquid.

By the 1980s, a few majors, including Mobil, Total, and BHP, had shown interest. Finally, in the late ’90s, Guyana decided to award an 8.7-million-acre oil exploration lease to Canadian explorer CGX Energy. And that lease… you guessed it… was smack-dab in the middle of the “New River” area Suriname still claimed as its own.

Ever since the “Camp Climax” paint ball match, Guyana and Suriname had continued to snipe at each other over the border, seizing each other’s fishing boats and locking up fishermen. They’d eventually established a “Guyana-Suriname Cooperation Council,” where the meetings frequently erupted into brawls.

When CGX Energy trotted out its first offshore platform in 2000, on one of two promising oil fields in the disputed territory, Suriname sent a fleet of gunboats and dragged the Canadian rig right off. That touched off yet another international crisis, and a seven-year-long stalemate on any oil exploration and drilling in the area.

Guyana eventually took the case before the highest court they could – the United Nations International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (“ITLOS”). With the help of an illustrious team of international lawyers, ITLOS determined a definite border in 2007. It was a positive ruling for Guyana, with the majority of desired drilling sites ruled to be within Guyanese territory.

During the standoff, CGX and other oil companies had used their time wisely, honing 3D seismic technology to accurately map drilling sites. With the area finally open for business, explorers flooded in starting in 2008. The explorers soon struck black gold, with over 130 high-quality, oil-bearing sandstone reservoirs stretched out primarily across an offshore area called the Stabroek block.

Since 2019, when Stabroek production began in earnest, crude oil production in Guyana has exploded from 15,000 barrels per day (b/d) to over 630,000 b/dbarrels per day, with 1.3 million b/dbarrels a day expected by 2027. The oil boom has contributed double-digit yearly growth to the Guyanese economy since 2020, and made it the world’s largest oil producer per capita.

And, happily for the Guyanese, free-market reforms have been in place since the 1990s. The result? Guyana is one of the faster-growing economies in the world, with an incredible 43.6% GDP growth rate in 2024.

Today the Stabroek block is owned by three large oil companies – China’s CNOOC and America’s Chevron (CVX) and ExxonMobil (XOM).

All three companies stand to make a windfall on one of the world’s largest conventional oil fields, with an all-in cost of production around $30 per barrel. That’s including all exploration, development, operating costs, taxes, royalties, etc. That makes the field one of the lowest cost sources of offshore, high-quality light sweet crude in the world.

A major focus of our investments in Complete Investor this year is in energy. As President Donald Trump tries to run the economy “hot” with huge government deficit spending and manipulated interest rates, we think energy prices are very likely to chase gold and silver much higher.

Thus, all three of these companies will likely perform well in 2026. But only one of these companies is about to double the size of its proven reserves in the Permian basin thanks to a new, proprietary way of increasing its recovery rates from America’s richest oil fields.

This new technology, along with its booming Guyana oil field, positions this month’s recommendation to be the world’s leading energy producer for the next decade.

– They Ringed Fenced Me!”

I got my start as an oil and gas investor in early 2010 when I received a call from my long-time best friend, the Texas legend, Cactus Schroeder.

Since the early 2000s, I’ve hunted and fished all over the world with Cactus. He’s hosted me on his incredible mountain ranch in New Mexico, where I’ve shot trophy elk. And I’ve hosted him on my fishing yachts in the Bahamas, where we’ve caught massive blue marlin. In between there’s hardly a fish, a fowl, or a monster on land or sea that we haven’t harvested and eaten.

But when we first met each other, he was a poorly paid landman (yes, like in the show) and I’d just launched my very first publishing company. We were both still flying coach. But after fishing with Cactus in Panama in 2002, I knew I’d met someone very special who was going to do great things in life.

Cactus’ life changed forever in the mid-2000s when he, Barth Whitham, and some other partners leased 5,000 acres in the middle of nowhere in South Texas. They found some good geology and hit on some sour gas wells using a new technique – horizontal drilling.

This was only a few years after George Mitchell had “cracked” the very first shale gas field, the Barnett Shale, near Fort Worth, Texas.

In South Texas Cactus was using the same techniques as Mitchell. He was drilling 13,000 feet underground and then drilling 1,000 feet horizontally. The land was cheap, so they leased some more acres, with their position growing to 50,000 acres across Klarnes and Bee County, Texas. With gas prices trading over $12 in June of 2008, it looked like they were going to “print.”

But then everything collapsed. Gas prices plummeted after the Global Financial Crisis, falling to under $3 by the fall of 2009. Suddenly, they were in danger of losing their field.

Meanwhile, in October 2008, right in the middle of the crisis, a small company called Petrohawk Energy drilled STS #1H well in LaSalle County, just a few miles down the road from Cactus’ lease. It not only produced a huge amount of natural gas but it also produced a valuable liquid hydrocarbon called condensate – a very lightweight form of crude oil. As word leaked out, more and more prospectors began drilling in South Texas. Drilling permits in the region grew from 26 in 2008 to over 1,000 by 2010.

Cactus called me one day in early 2010. He sounded like a kid on Christmas morning.

you wouldn’t believe it. They’ve ringed fenced me! They’ve been drilling all around my land – on all sides.

I was a little confused. It sounded bad to me at first. Didn’t that mean Cactus couldn’t easily lease any more ground, because he’d been surrounded? I was thinking that Cactus was trapped. But I had it all wrong.

Cactus explained the situation as though talking to a small child or one of his incredible bird dogs. Just imagine the biggest, best friend you’ve ever had in your life, talking very slowly and explaining how he was about to make the greatest fortune of his life:

Porter. Every well they drill is a well I don’t have to drill. You see, they’re spending millions of dollars to prove the value of my land. I’ve got working rigs surrounding my entire property now. And the richest part of the trend – the “wettest part” – runs right through my ranch in Karnes County. These wells are full of condensate. And that’s worth a lot more than just dry gas.

The Biggest Story Of My Career

On April 14, 2010, in a letter titled “All The Oil In Texas” I broke what I still believe was the biggest story of my entire career: the story of the coming Texas oil boom. Not only was America not facing “peak oil,” it was about to experience the biggest oil boom in history.

I expect Eagle Ford to yield more than $2 billion in oil and gas by 2013 and to increase steadily for at least 20 years. These numbers mean Eagle Ford will probably produce hundreds of billions worth of oil and gas over the next 30-40 years.

Even though very few people believed me at the time, I was being conservative.

Karnes County wells alone have, so far, produced 1.46 billion barrels of oil. With an average price of $70 per barrel, that’s already more than $100 billion worth of oil. Across the entire Eagle Ford, more than 10 billion barrels of oil have been produced so far – more than $1trillion in oil and gas revenue.

It was around then that EOG (formerly Enron Oil and Gas) made an announcement that stunned the world: it was no longer going to be in the natural gas business. EOG drilled 16 delineation test wells along a 120-mile line in the Eagle Ford, spanning six counties.

They estimated almost a billion barrels of crude oil would be produced from their properties in the field. EOG CEO Mark Papa told the press: “We believe the South Texas Eagle Ford horizontal crude oil play will prove to be one of the most significant United States oil discoveries in the past 40 years.”

Within a few months of that call, Cactus and his partners sold their acreage for $1.4 billion to Norway’s Statoil.

And it was shortly thereafter that Cactus told me about the monster field that would become the Permian Basin. Back then it was just called West Texas. And what made it so special was that its geology was built like a layer cake. Several different massive shales, stacked one on top of the other, were spread over millions and millions of acres.

Thus I knew, as early as 2011, that truly unprecedented supplies of crude oil, natural gas, and condensate were going to hit the market.

Over the next several years, I made it “rain” for my readers as this incredible economic engine transformed the entire world.

The easiest call was realizing how much natural gas America could produce – almost for free, as the oil production also was generating huge amounts of “associated” gas.

In my July 2011 issue, I first predicted that natural gas would become “the energy of the 21st century” and that America would come to dominate the liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) industry.

I recommended investors buy Cheniere Energy (LNG), which at the time was building its first LNG export facility. Its shares have gone up about 2,000% since then. Keep in mind, at the time America exported virtually zero LNG and most people didn’t believe it was possible. In fact, I knew about Cheniere because I’d originally shorted the stock in 2006. The company’s original business plan was to import natural gas into the U.S. because everyone was so afraid of peak oil! I knew that was “Madness,” as I titled my newsletter that month. The stock went from $30 to $3. But as soon as Cheniere decided to reverse engineer its Gulf Coast facility to export gas, I knew it would make investors a fortune.

Then, in my December 2012 issue, I predicted U.S. shale surpluses would make America the world’s leading crude oil exporter. Everyone thought I was crazy: it was against the law, at the time, to export crude oil! But I knew the law would have to change because the coming wave of oil production was going to flood the American market.

Until the law changed, though, it was easy to see that natural gas liquids (NGLs like propane) would be the only legal way to export the huge energy surpluses. I recommended Targa Resources (TRGP) as the only midstream operator on the Gulf Coast with large propane export facilities. Targa’s market cap has ballooned from $5 billion in 2012 to over $44 billion today.

My point is this: long before anyone else knew what was happening, I was certain that America would, once again, become both the largest producer of hydrocarbons and the world’s largest hydrocarbon export nation. And I knew all of this because of Cactus Schroeder.

Since then, U.S. crude oil production has tripled. Today, the U.S. is the world’s top global energy exporter. One-third of U.S. hydrocarbons now clear global markets. America leads the world in crude oil production with 13.2 million b/day, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is also the world’s leading crude oil export nation. In 2025, U.S. LNG exports hit a record 111 million metric tons – first country ever over 100 million tons in a year, 20 million tons ahead of Qatar. U.S. exports represented 25% of global supply.

Today, once again, the peak oil people are starting to chirp. The shale fields are going dry, they claim. Doom is upon us…

Nonsense. The single greatest business in American history is about to flex its incredible technical capabilities and launch the second global shale revolution.

I hope that by now you’ve come to trust what I say about oil and gas – not the doomsayers.