Jefferies previews Kiawah energy conference themes By Investing.com

The market is starting to price energy through a geopolitical-risk premium rather than a pure supply-demand lens, and that matters more for different parts of the complex than headline crude direction. The clearest second-order winner is U.S. LNG: higher perceived fragility in Qatari supply should raise the strategic value of U.S. molecules, improve contracting leverage, and support FIDs for projects that were previously marginal on financing or customer commitment. That creates a medium-term setup where equities with visible export growth can outperform even if spot gas remains soft in the near term.

The sharper opportunity is in infrastructure and services rather than producers. If LNG contracting stays constructive, midstream and gas-service names get a longer runway of capital deployment, with earnings less exposed to commodity volatility and more tied to project cadence and utilization. KGS looks interesting as a levered beneficiary of activity normalization: if the market begins to believe the 2030 EBITDA growth path, the stock should rerate before the cash flow actually shows up, because service multiples usually move on backlog visibility, not realized cash.

SOC is a higher-beta special situation with asymmetry around policy optionality. The market is likely underestimating how valuable even a small initial storage project would be as a proof point; if the strategic reserve concept gains traction, it creates a quasi-public backstop for the asset and could compress funding risk materially. The risk is that this remains a political talking point rather than a budgeted program, in which case the stock can give back quickly because the equity is discounting multiple layers of optionality.

The contrarian read is that the most obvious trade — higher oil on Middle East escalation — may be less durable than expected, while diesel and power-burn tightness could matter more over the next 6-18 months. Jefferies’ view on gas-to-coal switching suggests the real squeeze may emerge once coal economics force burn back to gas, which would be a cleaner bullish setup for U.S. gas infrastructure than for outright crude beta. The market is probably still too focused on immediate war headlines and not enough on the lagged inventory, power demand, and export-reconfiguration effects that compound into 2026.