With oil prices rising, our minds might reasonably drift back to the half-dozen or so energy companies who were teased earlier in the year… particularly because despite the spike back up in oil prices, most of them are still trailing the S&P 500 returns since they were teased, and those higher prices could have a meaningful impact on some of those players.

The caveat is always, “but gas, too” — most of the oil companies in North America are also at least partially natural gas companies, and gas prices, while they have recovered a bit from the Spring lows, are still quite depressing for the gas producers (prices were in the $3-6 range before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then spiked to $10 briefly, and have been below $2 for much of this year before recovering to about $2.50 in recent months).

So if you’re looking for candidates that are not yet enjoying any of that “lift” in oil prices, we’ve got Tim Melvin’s teased Berry Petroleum (BRY), Charle Mizrahi’s teased Paramount Resources (POU.TO, PRMRF) and (microcap) Journey Energy (JOY.TO, JRNGF), and Adam O’Dell’s Enerplus (ERF) as well as the royalty-based oil and gas names, which have most recently been Permian Basin Trust (PBT) from Marc Lichtenfeld and Black Stone Minerals (BSM), which was teased by both Whitney Tilson and Alexander Green earlier this year. Several of those have some intriguing potential, but Black Stone Minerals would still be my first choice of that group, despite its reliance on natural gas, and it’s also the one where I have a bias here — I do still own some October calls that are right around the current price (strike price is $17.50), so I’ll probably have a decision to make about BSM in the next few weeks.

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And since we’re talking energy, gas leader EQT (EQT) has so far not made any real headway in its push to encourage the government to authorize or incentivize more natural gas infrastructure, including pipelines or infrastructure for future LNG exports, but that was always going to be a long and uphill battle… and they did make a deal this week to at least get some LNG export exposure. EQT made a tolling deal with Commonwealth LNG to essentially buy 15 years worth of LNG liquefaction starting in perhaps 2027, one million tons per year. EQT is not selling their gas to ...