Subject: Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?
This long running thread exemplifies confirmation bias regarding energy, EVs, ICEs and other related sectors. We likely can all agree human ingenuity is always involved with creating better products and services.

It is for that reason we don’t know what we don’t know going forward.

We can assume energy consumption will continue upward as a 200+ year trend. This informed my view (admitting confirmation bias) in 2020 non-green energy stocks were screamingly cheap. While humans keep finding pockets of petroleum around the world, in recent decades have seldom found elephant sized fields. The huge Middle East elephant sized oil fields have been continuously pumped for seventy or more years. The same is true for many other significantly sized fields around the world. Again, we don’t know what we don’t know. We do know overall energy consumption of all types will be needed to grow to maintain worldwide GDP and societal stability.

Michael Malboussan and Daniel Callahan recently published a Charts from the Vault. One set of charts showed how the largest technology companies in recent years have transitioned from asset light to asset heavier with increasing investments in cloud/AI related sites that also consume vast quantities of electrical energy. I had a discussion last month with a person who told me of server farm sites being considered adjacent to large gas producing sites in the US and Canada for natural gas electricity generation for AI servers. I commented about having to push digital information father distances because of the remoteness of those natural gas fields. He said fiber optic pipes are a more easily solved aspect than acquiring the 24/7/365 available electrical energy consumed by those AI sites.

My humble and likely flawed analysis concludes we can all go 100% to EVs or maybe to solely using Waymo taxi services and still world demand for fossil fuels will continue at high levels. Perhaps not at today’s levels, but probably at a slightly lower consumption plateau. Meanwhile, known oil and gas fields continue declining.

When something (a physical asset) that is necessary for modern life gets screamingly cheap, my self admitted confirmation bias is to buy those companies like was seen in 2020. We may look back one day and say fossil fuels companies were cheap in late 2024.

Good luck to all my fellow confirmation biased investors on this wonderful site.

Uwharrie