Apertura Energy

The Opening Act.

Good Morning Team.

In the not too distant past, I penned a thinkpiece on Moonshots - stocks with >10x potential - with a high level of risk but rewards that make Aladdin’s Cave look like a depleted piggy bank.

I think I’ve found some more alpha.

And just possibly, the Omega.

(Educational sidenote - the Omega ratio is a real thing, I’m not using this simply for dramatic effect).

With the usual risk caveats - this is not financial or investing advice, small caps all carry an elevated level of risk, and these articles enjoy the exciting combination of being both non-regulated and also aimed at sophisticated investors capable of making their own sovereign decisions - this is one of the best macro set-ups I’ve seen in 2026.

And I saw a stock go up >3,000% in three months.

I can’t promise we have a 30x on our hands here though.

What I can say is that right now, you have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a trailblazing theme - and when capital floods into this space, there will be only one name to which it can flood.

And that name is Apertura Energy.

Your ‘opening’ to Venezuela - in both opportunity and reality.

Let’s dive in.

Apertura Energy: The only Way To Play Venezuela

I’m actually unsure where to start here. This investment case is so good, it’s actually disgusting.

You know what?

I do know where to start.

Venezuela.

Before you can understand the Apertura Energy opportunity, you need to understand Venezuela.

Not the Venezuela you might think of initially; the one of news headlines and humanitarian statistics. The Venezuela of geology, history, and what is now — for the first time in a generation — a reopening of one of the most consequential energy prizes on earth.

Let’s start with a number: 303 billion barrels.

That’s Venezuela’s proven oil reserve base. Saudi Arabia, the country most people associate with vast oil wealth, has 267 billion.

Venezuela has more.

It sits on the single largest accumulation of proven hydrocarbons anywhere on the planet, concentrated primarily in the Orinoco Belt — a vast onshore strip in the east of the country that represents one of the greatest geological endowments ever identified.

20% of the world’s oil resources, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

These are not exploration barrels.

The oil is there, mapped, understood and proven.

In the 1990s Venezuela knew exactly what it had and was building toward it. Production was running at 3.5 million barrels per day.

Nearly 100 drilling rigs were active across the country.

PDVSA, the state oil company, was a world-class operator (any oiler would agree) — technically sophisticated, internationally respected and staffed by tens of thousands of experienced petroleum engineers and field workers.

Venezuela was the fourth largest oil producer on earth and it was growing.

Then along came Hugo Chávez.

The nationalisation of the oil industry, the enabling laws that allowed the government to override contracts and seize private assets, and most devastatingly the firing of over 18,000 skilled PDVSA employees following a 2002 strike — replacing them wholesale with political loyalists who had no technical expertise — began a collapse that would take two decades to reach its worst point.

For those tempted by the promises of charismatic hard left politicians here in the UK, this is a textbook example of good intentions paving the road to economic hell.

When Chávez died in 2013 and Nicolás Maduro took over, production was already down to 2.7 million barrels per day and falling.

By 2020, under the combined weight of Maduro’s mismanagement, US sanctions, corruption and the near-total exodus of skilled workers from the country, production had collapsed below 500,000 barrels per day.

The country with the world’s largest reserves was producing less oil than it had at any point in modern history.

The human cost ran alongside the economic one. Millions of Venezuelans left the country, among them Apertura’s founders.

Money printing hyperinflation destroyed savings overnight. Basic services collapsed.

What had been one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America became one of its most desperate.

For those who remember their GCSE History on the Weimar Republic, Venezuela was the same but on steroids. Weimar sorted their initial mess out in the year of 1923, while Venezuela suffered hyperinflation through 2016 to 2020 before entering de facto dollarisation simply to survive.

Don’t print money kids.

In 2018 alone, Venezuela’s annual inflation rate reached an estimated 130,000% (with some independent estimates placing it over 2,000,000%).

There’s a lesson there for western politicians, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Back to Venezuela.

Everything changed in the early hours of Saturday 3 January 2026.

Flying at 100 feet above water, US special forces helicopters crossed into Venezuelan airspace while other aircraft jammed the country’s radar systems and destroyed its air defences.

By 1am US Eastern Time, soldiers had reached Maduro’s compound in Caracas — described by Trump as a heavily fortified military fortress. Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were extracted and flown to the USS Iwo Jima.

By the time Caracas woke up, their president was gone.

Operation Absolute Resolve was the largest US military action in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama. Venezuela claims 100 people were killed. Cuba confirmed 32 of its military personnel died protecting Maduro.

Seven American service members were injured.

Maduro himself sustained a leg injury during the capture. He now sits in a federal detention facility in Brooklyn, facing narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges in the Southern District of New York. His wife is also in custody.

There is no realistic path back for either of them.

Within 48 hours, Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president. The transition, which many analysts predicted would trigger violent civil conflict and economic collapse, was (and I stress, comparatively) orderly.

The country kept functioning.

We’re now getting to the important bit for would-be oil investors.

Trump announced that the US would ‘run’ Venezuela until a ‘safe, proper and judicious transition’ could be ensured,

He also told a news conference ahead of Maduro’s arrival in New York that:

‘The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.’

Critics called this imperialism.

Investors called it a guarantee.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright flew to Caracas and announced that Washington intended to oversee Venezuelan oil sales indefinitely.

The financial architecture that emerged is market-moving in its implications — Venezuelan oil revenues began flowing through US-controlled accounts, with disbursements made back to the interim government rather than oil money flowing freely into state coffers the way it had under Maduro.

Venezuela transferred between 30 and 50 million barrels of crude to the US and received $500 million back under a brokered agreement. The world’s largest oil reserve nation was effectively placed into a form of receivership, with the United States acting as trustee.

For potential investors, this means oil revenues cannot simply disappear. It means the US has direct financial leverage over the interim administration.

And it means that American companies operating in Venezuela do so with an implicit political guarantee that simply didn’t exist before — Washington is not going to allow its own firms to have their assets seized while it controls the country’s oil money.

Rodríguez moved quickly on the legal framework.

On 15 January she proposed sweeping reforms to Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law, rolling back 25 years of state controls and nationalisations. PDVSA’s CEO announced a target of 18% production growth in 2026 alone. The sector was formally reopened to foreign investment on terms that would have been unthinkable under Maduro or Chávez.

What makes this durably important, rather than just a short-term political shock, is that it’s one of very few rare bipartisan issues in Washington.

Republicans see Venezuela through the lens of Monroe Doctrine strategy, pushing Chinese and Russian influence out of the Western hemisphere, securing energy assets and stopping drug flows into the US.

It’s also why they backed Trump’s actions in Iran - it stops China getting oil (and explains why China is spending billions electrifying - it has limited hydrocarbons of its own).

Democrats spent years calling Maduro an illegitimate dictator, backed the opposition, and supported sanctions over the humanitarian catastrophe of millions of Venezuelans fleeing the country.

There is no serious political constituency in Washington arguing for reversal. A Democrat returning to the White House in 2028 is not going to undo this, hand Venezuela back to Chinese oil buyers, or restore the conditions that allowed Maduro to operate.

The strategic logic crosses party lines in a way that almost no other foreign policy issue does.

Shell, BP, Chevron, Repsol and Eni have all signalled re-entry or are actively expanding existing positions. But they have been burned before, and they know it.

Chávez’s nationalisations in the mid-2000s cost the international majors billions collectively. Outstanding arbitration awards against Venezuela for those seizures still haven’t been paid.

These companies are not going back in on the same terms.

The structures are fundamentally different this time. Rather than taking equity stakes in Venezuelan fields that could be nationalised, companies are structuring deals as production sharing agreements and service contracts where they recover costs and profits through the crude itself before it leaves the country.

By the time any future government could theoretically move against an asset, the company has already been paid in oil sitting in a tanker heading to the Gulf Coast. You cannot nationalise oil that has already been exported.

Contracts are being written with mandatory international arbitration clauses under neutral jurisdictions — London, New York, The Hague.

Venezuela, desperately needing investment and needing to maintain credibility with global capital markets for the first time in decades, is accepting terms it would never have entertained before. And the new hydrocarbons law, whatever its long-term durability, at least creates a legal basis for international claims that didn’t exist under the old framework.

The combination of US political cover, payment-in-kind structures, new legal protections and international arbitration creates a risk profile that is different from the one that got the majors burned the first time.

Not risk-free — nothing in Venezuela is risk-free (indeed, nothing in investing is ever risk free) — but better. Much better.

Repsol is already producing 45,000 barrels per day from existing operations and has announced plans to triple that within three years. Eni’s CEO flew to Caracas in April 2026 and signed a joint development agreement with PDVSA.

Chevron executed a strategic asset swap to gain greater exposure to the Orinoco Belt specifically — a deal analysts believe could unlock $100 billion in long-term reconstruction value from that single transaction.

BUT.

And there’s a big but.

Venezuela currently has two active drilling rigs operating in the entire country. At peak production in the 1990s there were nearly 100.

A rig is the unit of oil field work. You need them to drill new wells, workover underperforming existing wells, access new reservoir sections and do basically anything that grows production.

Running two rigs in a country with 303 billion barrels of proven reserves and a stated ambition to return to 3.5 million barrels per day is an almost incomprehensible mismatch between resource and activity.

It’s the single clearest illustration of how completely the operational infrastructure of Venezuelan oil has collapsed under the past two decades of mismanagement.

Getting from two rigs to the operational intensity required for serious production growth means rebuilding a supply chain almost from scratch.

Rigs need to be sourced or rehabilitated.

Crews need to be trained or repatriated.

Fuel, casing, drilling mud, maintenance infrastructure — all of it needs to be re-established in a country where it has largely ceased to exist.

This will be a multi-year industrial mobilisation and anyone who tells you otherwise sports a fickle relationship with the truth.

But every rig added is incremental production.

Going from two to ten is transformational.

Going from two to twenty starts to move the national production needle materially.

And the early rigs drilling in an environment of near-zero competition, into reservoirs that have been largely untouched for years, will be accessing the best prospects at the moment of lowest entry cost.

First mover advantage in drilling in Venezuela right now is a significant structural edge.

Trailblazing, one might say.

And the majors don’t have access to this infrastructure. They’re not nimble enough. Too slow.

But you know who’s quick on their feet?

We’ll get to that part.

Before that, there’s one more underappreciated dynamic creating a specific aperture for new entrants.

Existing operators in Venezuela face significant structural constraints on investment. Sanctions restrict access to debt, equity and offtake financing, while the obligation to sell crude to PDVSA against uncertain payment timelines makes capital allocation extremely difficult.

The result is underperforming assets — leaking pipelines, wells needing workover, equipment running below capacity — not by choice, but by necessity.

This creates a clear entry point for Apertura: partnering with incumbent operators who have the assets and the appetite to grow production, but lack the financing, rigs and operational support to do so.

Rather than competing with existing players, Apertura can position itself as the enabling partner that unlocks stranded value — bringing capital, equipment and execution capability to operations that are already in place and already producing.

Today, production sits at a little under 1 million barrels per day. The stated near-term target is 1.18 million after an 18% increase in 2026.

The medium-term credible case, supported by sustained foreign investment and the current political framework, is somewhere around 2.5 million barrels per day within a decade. The long-term peak potential, returning to 1990s levels, is 3.5 million barrels per day.

Going from under 1 million to 3.5 million is an addition of 2.5 million barrels of daily production.

At $70 a barrel that is $175 million of additional revenue every single day — $64 billion a year in incremental oil income for a country whose entire economy is currently worth roughly $100 billion.

At $80 a barrel the annual number is $73 billion.

The scale of value locked inside Venezuelan geology, relative to what is currently being extracted, is without parallel anywhere in the modern energy world.

The oil didn’t go anywhere. What collapsed was the human and institutional infrastructure above it — and that, unlike the geology, can be rebuilt.

Venezuela is not a normal oil story.

It’s the resurrection of what was once the fourth largest oil producer on earth, backed this time by American military and financial power, with the world’s largest reserve base sitting almost entirely untapped, and an industry operating at a tiny fraction of its achievable capacity.

The prize ahead is generational.

This is the country Apertura Energy is going into.

And Apertura are positioned to capture the trailblazer effect from both ends.

If you want exposure to this theme? There’s only one story.

If you want to copy their business model? You can’t.

Like the Brownlees are to the modern triathlon, the Gilberts are to Latin America oil & gas.

Consider.

Apertura’s Pitch

Before you can understand Apertura Energy the company, you need to understand the Gilberts.

No, not Elena and Jeremy.

Scott and Greig Gilbert are British-Venezuelan.

Their family has been in Venezuela’s oil sector for three generations. They didn’t read about the collapse in news headlines — they watched it happen to something their family helped build, and eventually, like millions of other Venezuelans, they left.

That personal history is not incidental to the investment case.

It is the investment case.

In-country networks, relationships with veterans who remember how the industry functioned at its peak, knowledge of which assets are permanently destroyed vs just a little bit distressed, understanding of the regulatory landscape and who actually makes decisions on the ground — none of this can be acquired with money.

And that institutional knowledge takes decades to build. You know how every large company’s IT functions are kept functioning by one 63-year-old man named Ian who keeps getting paid increasingly insane amounts of money to keep the show on the road?

That’s what institutional knowledge is.

The Gilberts have it, and it runs three generations deep.

This isn’t a ‘founder with a good story’ pitch - I see a new one of these every week.

The Gilberts spent the last TWENTY years building the infrastructure to come back to Venezuela when the time came.

Scott is CEO of Corcel, an AIM-listed oil and gas E&P with operations across Africa and Latin America. He’s proven capable of navigating difficult frontier energy markets — doing deals, managing regulators, raising capital on London markets and operating in some environments that perhaps make even Venezuela look straightforward.

He knows how to build a listed energy vehicle.

He’s done it.

Greig runs Conterp Group.

Conterp is a very real operating business doing very real oilfield work.

Right now.

For more than two decades, Conterp has specialised in onshore oil and gas well intervention across Brazil. The company employs more than 750 qualified personnel, operates offices strategically positioned throughout the country and owns a large portfolio of proprietary equipment including workover rigs, well intervention systems and well services machinery operating across the full lifecycle of field operations — from exploration drilling through to mature field management.

You might be able to spot why this matters.

Conterp already has active contracts with Petrobras, including a drilling campaign running from September 2025 through to June 2029 covering onshore wells in Bahia.

In other words, it’s an established Latin American oil services operator with infrastructure, crews, logistics capability and one of the largest energy companies in the hemisphere as a core customer.

Its portfolio includes multiple operational rigs and intervention assets alongside decades of local market knowledge and relationships across Brazilian onshore oilfields.

Now think carefully about what Venezuela actually needs.

No, not PowerPoints.

Operational capability.

Venezuela, as noted above, has two active drilling rigs operating nationwide. At peak production in the 1990s, there were nearly 100.

Getting from two to 100 means mobilising equipment into a country where much of the industrial logistics infrastructure has deteriorated. It means trained crews, intervention capability, workovers, casing, drilling mud, maintenance systems, procurement channels and field services.

An entire ecosystem has to be rebuilt.

It’s hard for anyone sitting at a desk in the UK to even begin to understand just how big this undertaking is. It’s beyond almost any operator. Most companies would need to start by finding contractors.

Greig already owns one.

And that creates a structural advantage which is difficult to overstate.

Because of course the majors could theoretically rebuild Venezuelan infrastructure. Chevron has the capital; Shell has the tech.

I am not going to pretend they couldn’t do it as this would patently be nonsense.

But they are not nimble. Their procurement cycles alone can take longer than Apertura’s timeline to first acquisition. They move in years, not months, and they would still need to source third-party service capability into a country where institutional knowledge has largely disappeared.

Conterp changes that equation.

The drilling capability already exists.

The crews already exist.

The operational expertise already exists.

Apertura does not need to build this ecosystem from scratch because the Gilberts spent the last 20 years building it elsewhere in Latin America.

And then there is AOT International, which completes the picture on the supply side.

Founded in 2016, AOT specialises in sustainable oilfield products and services across onshore, offshore, oil, gas and geothermal operations. Its capabilities span product sales, equipment rental, manufacturing and technical support.

Everything else you might need.

Again, this sounds abstract until you place it into the Venezuelan context.

The country’s oilfield supply chain has effectively collapsed. Access to basic equipment, maintenance components, intervention tooling and technical support infrastructure is severely constrained. In that environment, having proprietary sourcing capability and established supply relationships is an operational necessity.

Most new entrants into Venezuela will spend years trying to assemble the infrastructure required to execute.

The Gilberts already have it, sitting inside the broader ecosystem they control.

They are co-founders of AOT International, while Group de Clermont — the family holding company they also co-founded — ties everything together through decades of energy investments across Africa and Latin America.

Think about what that ecosystem represents when you put it together.

1. You have E&P deal-making capability through Corcel.

2. You have a fully operational drilling and intervention business through Conterp.

3. You have supply chain, equipment sourcing and oilfield technology capability through AOT.

4. You have relationships and in-country networks that cannot be replicated externally.

5. And you have three generations of Venezuelan oil heritage giving credibility with every serious counterparty in Caracas.

This is the Goldilocks position.

Apertura is not so large that it becomes bureaucratic and slow. It’s not so small that it lacks operational capability.

It sits at the intersection of nimble enough to move fast and equipped enough to execute — and that intersection is extraordinarily rare in frontier energy markets.

This unique infrastructure capability and operational skill in a region many think impossible reminds me of another company I’ve backed for years to great success.

Amaroq.

Sure, they’re different in many many ways. But AMRQ is the only way to invest in the Greenlandic frontier - and Apertura is the same for Venezuelan oil.

And if you missed day one there, this is similarly mindboggling in potential scale.

The Vehicle

The listed entity was previously Red Capital, trading on the London Main Market under the ticker REDC. It’s clean. It’s now Apertura Energy, with ticker #VZLA.

We’ve seen a £1.6 million fundraise, the appointment of Scott as Non-Executive Chairman and Greig as CEO, and a full strategic pivot toward Venezuela.

As of 27 May, the AGM has been held and every resolution passed with 100% of votes cast.

The raise itself is modest by design.

This is not a billion-pound development vehicle.

It’s seed capital — enough to identify, evaluate and structure the inaugural transaction which must complete by July 2027 under listing rules.

The warrants issued alongside the raise only become exercisable once that first deal closes, meaning management’s upside is directly tied to execution.

Everyone is incentivised towards the same outcome.

You’re betting on a management team with the operational infrastructure, relationships, regional expertise and strategic positioning to become the first London-listed pure play vehicle targeting the reopening of the world’s largest oil reserve base.

Of course, when most people first look at Apertura, they focus on the E&P angle — the reserves, the acquisitions, the production upside.

That’s understandable.

But arguably the more important near-term advantage is the infrastructure layer underneath it, because this is the part that almost nobody else can replicate quickly enough to matter.

Apertura is not simply trying to buy Venezuelan assets. Anyone (well, lots of people) can do that. It’s aiming to bridge the enormous operational gap between Venezuela’s geological potential and its current industrial reality.

That gap is where the opportunity exists.

The needs rigs. Crews. Intervention capability. Equipment sourcing. Supply chains. Maintenance systems. Technical expertise. Operational continuity.

The Gilberts have spent two decades building exactly those capabilities across Latin America already.

Most competitors entering Venezuela would need to assemble all of this after deciding to pursue the opportunity.

Apertura arrives with the ecosystem pre-built.

This is mission critical in a reopening environment where speed is King.

The earliest rigs re-entering Venezuela will access the best opportunities at the lowest entry costs before competition intensifies and asset valuations rerate.

First-mover trailblazer advantage in frontier energy markets is real.

And Apertura is structurally positioned to exploit it. And once they have rigs in the field in the best opportunities, the majors will want a piece.

Think it can’t be done? Consider Kurdistan.

In the mid-2000s, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq reopened to international oil investment following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Another chap the Americans removed.

Like Venezuela, the geology was exceptional but the politics were (to put it mildly) complicated.

Infrastructure was degraded.

The majors moved cautiously.

And a handful of London-listed independents entered early.

One of them was Gulf Keystone Petroleum.

The company secured a production sharing contract over the Shaikan field and ultimately proved up one of the largest discoveries in the region — more than 500 million barrels of 2P reserves across a field stretching roughly 280 square kilometres northwest of Erbil.

For moonshot investors positioned early enough, the returns were astronomical.

In fact, those who bought the very bottom saw the fabled 100x.

Yes, the comparison with Venezuela is not exact. Kurdistan was a semi-autonomous region within a federal state while Venezuela is a semi-sovereign nation operating under US financial and political nannying.

And Venezuela’s reserve base dwarfs anything Kurdistan ever possessed.

But the structural dynamic is remarkably similar.

A frontier jurisdiction reopens.

Infrastructure is degraded.

Majors move slowly.

Capital hesitates initially.

And a small number of early movers secure disproportionate positioning before the opportunity becomes consensus.

In Kurdistan, that rerating window lasted several years before competition intensified and valuations adjusted accordingly.

In Venezuela, given the sheer scale of the prize, the window may be shorter.

And it will not stay open forever.

And now we come to the closer.

When capital eventually floods into the Venezuelan energy story — and based on everything above, the question increasingly appears to be when rather than if — where exactly does a London-based investor gain meaningful exposure?

Chevron is a $360 billion company.

Shell is Shell.

Repsol is a multinational integrated energy major.

Buying any of them for Venezuelan exposure means buying enormous diversified businesses where Venezuela is barely a footnote in annual capital allocation discussions.

Apertura will be the only London-listed pure play vehicle dedicated specifically to Venezuelan energy.

Every private investor, family office and small-cap energy fund seeking direct exposure to the reopening of the world’s largest proven reserve base has one London-listed route into the theme.

One ticker.

One vehicle.

One management team purpose-built around this specific opportunity.

That is an extraordinarily powerful structural position independent of whichever asset they ultimately acquire first.

Could anyone else replicate this? In theory, yes. A sufficiently capitalised operator could attempt to replicate the Apertura model.

Money seeking oil is not exactly an unknown relationship.

But assembling all the relevant pieces simultaneously — and doing so quickly enough to compete — is a completely different challenge.

You would need Venezuelan relationships built over generations.

You would need an operational drilling and intervention business already functioning in Latin America with deployable crews and equipment.

You would need established oilfield supply chains and sourcing capability.

You would need frontier-market E&P experience operating public vehicles in difficult jurisdictions.

And you would need all of it immediately, not three years from now.

That is our economic moat.

One final point. Scott Gilbert is not coming into this with an untested publicly listed operational background. Corcel’s share price has exploded over the past couple of years. And analyst targets on Corcel still imply large additional upside from present levels despite that move.

Importantly, the Venezuelan reopening story is not yet reflected in Corcel itself, let alone in the embryonic Apertura vehicle.

When the individual building Apertura has already demonstrated the ability to generate outsized returns in adjacent frontier energy markets, that is where pattern recognition comes into play.

One final structural point. As noted above, US involvement in bipartisan and no reversal is likely to come.

Beyond the ideology though, there is a very practical energy logic underpinning this thesis.

Venezuelan crude is heavy and sour.

The refining infrastructure designed to process that specific type of crude sits overwhelmingly along the US Gulf Coast.

American refiners need Venezuelan barrels.

American strategic planners would vastly prefer those barrels flow toward Houston rather than Beijing.

A future Democrat administration is extraordinarily unlikely to reverse course, hand Venezuelan oil revenues back toward Chinese influence or recreate the conditions that produced one of the worst humanitarian collapses in modern Latin American history.

Yes, I agree that no Democrat President would have taken Maduro captive. But they’re not (outside of media point scoring) complaining on any level.

The macro foundation underpinning the Apertura investment case therefore extends beyond any single election cycle and is embedded within broader American strategic interests.

The Bottom Line

Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, only two active drilling rigs, and a US-backed government actively reopening the sector to foreign capital for the first time in a generation.

The Gilberts bring three generations of Venezuelan oil heritage, an operational drilling and intervention company with hundreds of deployable personnel, oilfield technology and supply-chain capability, frontier-market E&P experience and relationships that cannot be purchased externally.

Apertura Energy will become the only London-listed pure play on this entire theme.

The market currently prices all of this at pennies in oil and gas terms.

I said earlier this was one of the strongest macro setups I’ve seen in 2026.

Having laid out the country, the infrastructure, the management ecosystem, the strategic positioning and the structural moat, I’ll stand by it.

The oil never disappeared.

The infrastructure to extract it is being rebuilt.

And the people best positioned to rebuild it are standing at the front of the queue.

P.S. Please, please consider your risk appetite and positioning. The potential here is exceptional but this is not somewhere to invest your life savings. I specialise in identifying asymmetric investment opportunities - but if you’re looking for a 100x return, you need to accept the risk may well be commensurate.

Also - try the wine in the headline image. It’s fantastic, easy to find and very affordable.