In this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan welcomes Tracy Shuchart to the show. Tracy is the founder, CEO, and chief market strategist of Hilltower Research Advisors. She's also the author of the Renegade Resources newsletter on Substack, which has more than 8,000 subscribers.

Tracy kicks things off by discussing the issues surrounding diesel. She says that the world was previously in a "diesel crunch" in 2025, which only started to ease up in early 2026. With 14% of global refined products passing through the Strait of Hormuz, tension with Iran has started to set things back again. Tracy also states that there's a diesel refinery issue. The U.S. has been slow to build new refineries and is importing diesel from Europe, which is experiencing its own refinery problems. Tracy then gives her 10-year outlook on diesel for the U.S., with part of the solution being that the country looks to South America...

We're still going to need more refined products globally. And so, I suspect we'll probably see more build-out in South America because we would rather have that within our sphere of influence, so to speak, rather than having to rely on the Middle East so much... I think as this moves on, and especially after the Strait of Hormuz issue, we are really going to see the U.S. turn more towards South America... After this particular incident, a whole scope of [the] energy market is about to shift again.

Next, Tracy shares her reasoning for discussing municipal bonds in her recent writings. She sees a lot of risk in buying energy bonds right now and cautions investors to know what they're buying if they decide to buy any of them. She then mentions how commodities have more applications than most folks realize and are connected with other resources. For example, a sulfuric acid shortage in Africa is impacting copper mines. Tracy then shifts the discussion to China's willingness to produce energy by utilizing any resources necessary, including coal, and she believes that Southeast Asian countries could also start leaning more toward coal as well. She thinks that while nuclear energy is starting to be seen as a viable energy solution, it will take time to establish power plants and overcome remaining pushback...

We are beginning to see changes in [the perspective of nuclear], particularly from Europe, who is very anti-, anti-, anti-[nuclear]. And I think we're starting to see a global change. We have more projects in the pipeline globally. The problem is that they just take time... Nuclear certainly would be great. It's clean... But again, those projects are big projects – they take time. And they're also subject to permitting issues and "not in my backyard" issues. And so, we need to streamline the bureaucracy that is involved in all of these projects.

Finally, Tracy explains the problems with relying on solar power as a primary source, especially since our grids aren't built to accommodate it. And while there are discussions about adding batteries, she says it's not efficient enough or economically viable for widespread use. Tracy then shares several companies that she's looking at that she believes will be well positioned once the Iran conflict settles. And she concludes things by sharing her bullish outlook on gold...

I love gold. I am bullish gold far, far, far, far out. So for me, personally, I like to see parabolic moves that have a pullback – a decent pullback. I know that everyone is like, "Gold is dead." No, it's not. I think it has much further to run over years. So I am still a big gold fan. I think that we did see gold miners take a hit – silver miners as well – but I think now is a good time to look at them once again.

Click on the image below to watch the video interview with Tracy right now. For the audio version, click "Listen" above.

(Additional past episodes are located here.)

This Week's Guest

Tracy Shuchart is the founder, CEO, and chief market strategist of Hilltower Resource Advisors and the author of the Renegade Resources newsletter on Substack. Tracy began her career at the Chicago Board of Trade in 2005, working her way up from a broker to managing a trading desk for a futures, options, and over-the-counter energy brokerage. She has worked with firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Société Générale, and more. She later founded Hilltower Resource Advisors in 2018.

Tracy is a regular contributor on the energy markets for Fox Business, Bloomberg, BNNBloomberg, Asharq News (Dubai), CNBC, Money.net, Futures radio Show, and CME Group. Tracy holds degrees from the University of Southern California in political science and international relations.

Dan Ferris:                 It's all commodities all the time today with our guest Tracy Shuchart. She is an equity-focused, commodity-focused investor. I think she's brilliant. I've been reading her stuff for a long time and I've been watching her on Twitter for a long time. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation. We're going to talk about everything. I'm going to try to pull everything I can. We're going to talk about diesel and oil and helium and hydrogen and gold and silver, whatever else is on her mind. And we're going to talk about the Strait of Hormuz and North America, South of America, Europe, everything. She just has a head full of knowledge about commodities and what's going on in the world. I've done a little bit of work in this area myself, especially about the coming diesel crisis, which I believe is going to happen in America. You can go to nextenergyshock2026.com and hear a lot more about that. Lots of detail, a lot of my research there. Nextenergyshock2026.com. But for right now, let's talk with our guest, Tracy Shuchart. Let's do it right now.

                                    Tracy, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Tracy Shuchart:          Absolutely. Glad to finally meet.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, I'm super excited to have you here. I've been following you on, well, X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, for quite some time – years, I think. And I can't wait to dive in here because the first thing I want to talk about is a piece that you wrote in November about the refined products crisis. You set me off on an odyssey. I took that thing and I ran so hard with it and I found the basic – just for our listeners, the basic idea is there's maybe 5,400 data centers in this country. Ninety-five percent of them have diesel backups. Right?

Tracy Shuchart:          Yep.

Dan Ferris:                 So – and you go to "Data Center Alley" in Loudoun County, Virginia, if there's an extended power outage there, it's going to be pure chaos, 3% national demand spike in diesel. You're going to be paying $10 at the pump the next day. It's going to be insane, I think. And I just want to thank you for that. You really – you've sent me down a rabbit hole. I'm so into refineries now, and I'm researching hydrogen and some other things, and I just covered sulfuric acid and stuff. It's just been a wonderful experience, and you're the one who kind of lit the fire, so thank you for that.

Tracy Shuchart:          Well, all right. If I can get anybody interested in refined products, I love it.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. And I noticed in one of your pieces that – I didn't realize – I think you'd said 14% of the world's refined products go through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tracy Shuchart:          Correct.

Dan Ferris:                 Wow.

Tracy Shuchart:          And so, that's a big problem being that we already kind of – we were in a diesel crunch, a global diesel crunch in 2025. That literally just started to ease at the tail end of 2025 and into 2026 and then this happened. And so, that whole problem has reignited itself.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. And were – the refined products inventories are super low. When I saw those numbers – I hadn't looked into this. I saw those numbers and it's like multidecade lows in diesel. It's just like I had no idea. And I live in the West, so we're already paying – I think we're paying $6 for diesel. It's insane.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah, I believe that. Well, and we also – in the United States in itself we have a refining problem. We haven't built a new refinery since the '70s, honestly, which is –

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, '77, the Marathon refinery. Yeah.

Tracy Shuchart:          Exactly. Which is incredible. And so, now there is a new refinery being built in coordination with Reliance from India in Texas. But still, it's amazing to think – and all we have done is take refining capacity off line during those times as those – well, as California has been not so nice towards that business, so we have seen some refineries leave that area as well as just refinery shutdowns because they were so old. And so, that has caused us to have over the years a product problem.

Dan Ferris:                 One question I have about this is, given the fact that I think we had something like – it was close to 300 of these facilities, refineries in like the early '80s, I want to say 1982, and now it's like, what, 129 or something like that. It's just really come down. I'm surprised we're not paying even more at the pump. I'm surprised that that there isn't – this problem is something you and I are talking about. You and I know about it. You turned me on to it. Other people know about it. But it ain't on the evening news, right?

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah, which is quite – we have been able to manage to keep oil prices down. If you look at some – comparatively speaking, if you look at Europe, what they're paying at the pump is quadruple what we are paying. So – and they have obviously the same refining capacity problem as well. But what's really interesting, I think, is that people don't realize is that on the East Coast, because they don't want refineries there and because they've had many of their refineries shut down just because of aging and issues with that – particularly the last one was in Pennsylvania, one of the largest – we have to import diesel from Europe, which has a diesel problem. This is how ridiculous it gets.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. So, what is like – as far as I can tell, the role of – the regulatory role here, they've really created a huge problem as far as I can tell. Even the Benicia Refinery in Bay Area, California that's shutting down this month, as we speak, April, they cited, they said in a press release, "We just – we can't make money. We've been under – basically been under attack by the California government for years and years. We're not doing it anymore." And ironically, Tracy, that thing is turning into an import terminal for refined products. The irony. And they're paying $6, $7 for gas down there – well, in some places. $5 everywhere, right?

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah, absolutely. And it's just going to get worse for California. And currently, you have the governor blaming the oil companies somehow for this all, which is even more mind-blowing.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, I don't know. That guy, he – I don't know, he just seems really sort of clueless, kind of like a male Kamala Harris or something to me, and he just says these things, and of course, there's no credence to any of it. I don't even know what he thinks he means by that. But what – I want to know from you what happens next? What does this look like in, I don't know, 10 years or something? We haven't built a new refinery in almost 50 years. Ten years from now?

Tracy Shuchart:          Well, hopefully we will build more refineries. Again, we are building one, but we're still going to need more refined products globally. And so, I suspect we'll probably see more build-out in South America because we would rather have that sort of within our sphere of influence, so to speak, rather than having to rely on maybe the Middle East so much. That said, we do have – Saudi Arabia does own the largest refinery in America, which is Motiva. So, we're always going to import. And we import from Iraq. But I think as this moves on and especially after the Strait of Hormuz issue, we are really going to see kind of the U.S. turn more towards South America, which I think there's a lot of opportunities there. There's a lot of new discoveries there. There's a lot of refining capacity being built out in those countries just because of the new discoveries and because those governments are a little bit more conducive to the industry, because it's bringing tremendous wealth to some of those countries, particularly Guyana.

                                    So, it will be really interesting. I think after this particular incident, the whole scope of energy markets is about to shift again, kind of like in the 1970s when we had the oil crisis. Countries all over the world kind of woke up. Everybody started building out an SPR. We didn't have an SPR before that. And so, that kind of changed the landscape of oil and gas. And I think this is kind of similar to that crisis in the way that it's going to change the market.

Dan Ferris:                 I hope you don't mind a slight diversion here. You mentioned the SPR. How consequential is it really, the strategic petroleum reserve of the U.S.?

Tracy Shuchart:          Well, I'll tell you why. And I keep saying it's a national security issue and that this should be filled, because you never know what is going to happen. And I understand that the other side of that argument is, well, the U.S. produces so much oil, it doesn't really matter. We are the SPR. But I can counter that argument and say, first of all, we don't produce heavy crude, which we need for distillates, we need for diesel and jet fuel specifically. So, we don't have that. We store that in the SPR. In addition, we'll see how long oil prices remain elevated, but we were sitting at $50, $60 a barrel for over a year and oil companies were not drilling anymore. They were – they – oil investors had been burned twice.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, Harold Hamm left the Bakken.

Tracy Shuchart:          So – exactly.

Dan Ferris:                 It's like wow.

Tracy Shuchart:          Which, he started the Bakken.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, he is the – right? It's amazing.

Tracy Shuchart:          And so, we had a lot of oil companies say, "We're – we want to just keep our investors. We're going to keep free cash flows, stock buybacks, dividends. We're not – these – it's just not profitable for us to drill anymore." And then we have aging wells, obviously, in the Permian as well.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. And the depletion curves on fracking and there were – there's a bunch of things that they – that people cite. But yeah, but price, let's face it, at $58, I remember the Harold Hamm statement about taking Continental out of the Bakken because it was a week after that meeting at the White House where Darren Wood was saying Venezuela is uninvestable.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yes.

Dan Ferris:                 That meeting set me off on a little tangent looking in Venezuela, the home of refrigerated peanut butter. I had no idea that heavy sour crude is the consistency of refrigerated peanut butter. The infrastructure is completely different. The process is completely different. I mean, you're having to dilute the stuff, and where do you get the diluent from? The Gulf Coast. It's like a whole –

Tracy Shuchart:          It's a whole thing. You have to mix it with lighter – with naphtha or something, so it's not – you can't – it's just not – it comes out of the ground ready to go. It's a whole issue.

Dan Ferris:                 Special pipelines, then you turn it to syncrude, then, OK, then we're fine, you ship it to the Gulf Coast and we've got all those heavy refineries or whatever. But when I learned about that, I thought, "Man." I know Chevron's there and maybe they bump production, which was below 900,000 barrels a day at the time I was looking at things, a little while ago. And maybe they bump production a little bit. But getting back to the glory days is tens and tens and tens, a hundred billion or more away. And who's going to spend it?

Tracy Shuchart:          Well, exactly. And you never know what can happen in three years. What if the next administration changes those plans? Oil companies are looking at 20, 30 years out when they're going to engage in this kind of – these kind of projects and spend billions of dollars. And you're not going to do that when you don't know what's going to happen in three years.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. The uninvestability. That's right. Darin Woods' uninvestability wasn't, "Oh my God, the infrastructure is so bad. Oh my God, all the quality talent has left the country." That would come back under the right circumstances. It's about the political environment. And changing those things, changing laws and the government's attitude on a long-term basis is like – that's a dicey proposition. That's the point. That's what I took.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah. And effectively the same regime is still in play. There's not –

Dan Ferris:                 Yes. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 So, it's not a different government.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. So, now that I'm down the Venezuela hole, what's the real point of it? Is it like the minerals down in the south of the country? What is the real point of Trump talking about being in Venezuela and the whole idea?

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah, and I wrote a piece on this before that got some attention, but I think first and foremost, it was to get China, Iran, and Russia out of the country, or at least not in – because they were creeping on our sphere of influence. Particularly, they had a lot of influence in Iran – or, in Venezuela. And so, I think part of that reason was to kind of get them out of the country, push them away, get them out of our sphere of influence. And I also think there's a lot of critical minerals there. That's probably easier to tackle than the oil issue there that's going to take too much money. It's easier to get miners in there and you're not dealing with mines that are already built and decrepit and falling apart and have to spend billions. And so, it's a whole different project to tackle. So, really, that's what I think was the initial part of it. I know the president kept saying it was about oil, but I don't really think that it was entirely about oil. In fact, I think that has little to do with it.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah. In my Venezuela refrigerated peanut butter rabbit hole I found something by Rystad and something by G&R. And they were – I think it was G&R that cited in 2010 super majors had brought on maybe 600,000 or 650,000 barrels a day of heavy sour production for $40,000 per flowing barrel, $40,000 investment per flowing barrel. And now they were saying, "Well, if you look at recent work in Canada or someplace like that, it's like $100,000 per flowing barrel to bring on new heavy sour-crude production." That sounds like a lot to me. I'm not an oil specialist, but $100,000 per new flowing barrel sounds like a lot of money to me.

Tracy Shuchart:          It is a lot of money.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. I just needed my expert to tick that box for me because it sounded –

Tracy Shuchart:          It's a lot of money.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. All right. So, who knows? Who knows what will really happen? But that's, yeah, Donroe – so, Donroe Doctrine is a big part of the real answer there. I sort of guessed at that myself. I like hearing it from somebody who knows what they're talking about, too. What is it – lately, I just was running through some of your more recent pieces on Renegade Resources, which I recommend everybody read. I absolutely love it and was frankly a little surprised. When I think of Tracy, I think of oil. I want to hear about oil. Strait of Hormuz. Or gold. Commodities generally.

Tracy Shuchart:          I write about gold and silver.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, so when I saw a headline, your latest headline on Renegade Resources, about the $100 billion muni sector I was like, "Wait a minute." And I didn't, I just saw that, because I hadn't looked at it in a few days. "How is my commodity guru writing about the muni sector?"

Tracy Shuchart:          So, I fell into this rabbit hole. And it really comes down because – it comes down to the energy bonds, and which energy bonds are basically you lock in your prices at your utility companies for years and years and years. And we were seeing private credits kind of eke into that sector of the money market, which is very strange until you kind of get into it a little bit. And so, that's really how that whole piece came about.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind summing it up. What's your – it looks like the thing – it looks like you're trying to tell me that there's more risk there than – when we say muni bonds – when you say muni bonds, most people say, "Oh, it's not that risky." But it looks to me like the gist of your piece is that there's more risk than you think.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. Kind of hold – yeah, kind of know what you're investing in, know what you're buying in because a lot of these insurance companies hold a percent of their assets in these – in private-credit markets. They're involved in the munis. And munis as a whole really are generally more safe. I don't want to say – nothing's 100%. But this particular corner is being flagged with some issues right now. So, really, the gist of it is know what you own.

Dan Ferris:                 I see. What – by all means, feel free to stay in any rabbit hole that you want to. If that's what's on your mind right now, I would love to hear more about it. The muni thing. It sounded like you were telling me part of the problem is that there's long-term pricing locked in at the utility level.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. And then, this goes back into – and that leads into natural gas prices. And natural gas prices are stable, which they pretty much are in the U.S., but we have 13 million barrels a day off line. We've got 77 [tonnes per annum[ of [liquefied natural gas] off in Qatar and they say it's going to take two to five years. What does that mean for energy prices in the U.S.? Do we see a spike in natural gas prices? We do produce a lot. It may or may not happen. I don't think that it – I don't think the likelihood that it will happen will happen, but you never know. And you have to be aware of what you're investing in, what is tied to those bonds, which is definitely – natural gas is part of it. And so, I think just, again, the whole lesson was kind of really know what you're investing in right now.

Dan Ferris:                 So, just to make it as concrete for our listeners as possible, if you own muni bonds, if they're utility-related, energy-related muni bonds, maybe look into – maybe follow the trail from the bond back up to the company and see how the company has backed the bond specifically.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. And where – and that revenue stream may be – ultimately, I think we're saying that revenue stream might be somewhat imperiled by what's happening in the world right now, really.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah, absolutely, because it's going to – it is going to affect everything.

Dan Ferris:                 Well, yeah, so that is – what better way of saying what's happening half a world away is affecting everything than "be careful about your muni bonds in the U.S."

Tracy Shuchart:          Right.

Dan Ferris:                 Right? I would not have thought of this. And frankly, I hadn't written about commodities a whole lot – a little bit in the past few years, because I've liked them for many years at various times. And I recommended Sprott Inc. in 2018 and stuff. I've been covering a little company called Altius Minerals in Newfoundland since 2008 or something. So – or 2009. So, I'm into it, but this has really – this has refocused me, this war, because it just – once you go down the refinery rabbit hole and you realize the sulfuric acid production, what a moat. They're connected by pipeline to the customer, to the refinery. And they're not the only one like that. There's hydrogen production and stuff. It's pretty amazing.

Tracy Shuchart:          Well, yeah, and you have to look at sulfuric acid. You need sulfuric acid for mining. And so, now we're starting to see some mining companies, particularly copper miners in Africa are now worried because either they can't get it or prices have exploded. And so, you have to realize each of these things correlate to other products. It's a big web. It's not just gasoline and diesel that you see at the pump. All of these products affect something else. And we're also talking fertilizer. We're talking lighter [liquefied petroleum gases] to make plastics. This impacts everything. And we're kind of seeing that hit Asia right now really hard. We just came out – and so, that will ripple throughout the rest of the world. It's just going to take time to filter its way through.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Helium, I just looked at, and I just sort of Googled helium prices or something, and that – and they spiked up based on all of this. And I'm like –

Tracy Shuchart:          Absolutely. You need helium to make chips and…  

Dan Ferris:                 It's incredible. So, it's like all of a sudden I'm focused on this idea that you can print money. You can print crypto tokens and bonds and stocks and financial assets. You can't print helium. You can't print hydrogen. You can't print oil.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. Commodities.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. And for some time now in the U.S. and other places, underinvested – to say we're underinvested is kind of an understatement. It's like zero investment in many cases. Yeah. So, I'm looking at this and I've – I know about this but somehow, I tell you, this war just – I feel like I was a little late to the party. But then, the more I look at it, the more I think, "No, no, I don't think I'm as late to the party as I thought I was," because these problems – and going back to the diesel situation that we started talking about with, this is ongoing. It's not like the problem was created by the crisis. The refiners stock spiked after the crisis but the problem just sits there. It just seems to sit there. And even the refinery you're talking about in Houston, that's a proposition. They're proposing to do this. They haven't – there's no ground broken yet, right?

Tracy Shuchart:          Correct. And it'll take years to build, so –

Dan Ferris:                 And they'd better do a better choice of choosing the site than they did in Belfield, North Dakota, huh?

Tracy Shuchart:          Well, yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Right next to a national park. Maybe not the best choice.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. Exactly.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, I looked at that recently and I thought, "OK, so here's this site and they've got a road built and you can see that there's a berm where that the land has been sort of messed with, and they did some of the dirt work eight years ago or something." And it's just sitting there empty and they planted a crop on it to keep the soil from eroding. That's the state of the construction of a refinery in the United States of America in the year 2026.

Tracy Shuchart:          Is that just mind-blowing or what?

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, it is. That fact and turning Benecia into a refined products import terminal is just mind-blowing. It's insanity. I want to tell my listeners real quick, I do have a presentation about all this called nextenergyshock2026.com, and it's based on the diesel thing, Tracy. I think what you and I are describing there – and I give you credit for putting me onto it – it's like – there's a tail risk element. If we get an extended power outage and it's like one new diesel truck every seven minutes showing up at the one megawatt data center 300 times around Loudoun County, Virginia, that's – it's tail risk. We don't think it's going to happen tomorrow, but we don't know.

Tracy Shuchart:          But you never know. Exactly. There are many data centers being built and exist in Texas. They've had power outages before, so it's not like the risk is not there.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. So, we had this event. It was – I think it was just lots of rain in Tennessee. It was eastern Tennessee recently. And I was wondering because they've got some data centers there and it was in the news. And I thought, "OK, I'm going to hear about diesel trucks any minute," but it really never turned out that way. And it was – I think the problem was downed power lines. So, the generation was never imperiled. And apparently you can get power lines back up in some places reasonably quickly so that they didn't – basically, they didn't run out of diesel, is – I guess is what –

Tracy Shuchart:          Which is good.

Dan Ferris:                 But you and I are waiting for that headline, I think. We're just waiting for it.

Tracy Shuchart:          I think the chances of it happening are more than not. Let's put it that way.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. It may be – it's like – maybe it's a greater chance than something called tail risk, but here's the way I think of it and the way I think of financial market tail risk, too. It may be unlikely, but it's a lot more likely than anyone suspects.

Tracy Shuchart:          A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, same with another October 1987. That event was more likely than anyone thought, in the models and all of that stuff. And we actually talked with a previous guest, a guy named James Owen Weatherall. He wrote a book called The Physics of Wall Street. And we talked about people like Louis Bachelier and Benoit Mandelbrot and Edward Thorpe. And basically what I get from Mandelbrot is the stuff is more likely than you think. And the market prices, everybody models them as gliding here and there, and they leap. When sh** goes down, the price leaps.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah. Absolutely. Like, get out of the way.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah. So, that's what I'm afraid of with a lot of these things, but specifically with the diesel situation.

Tracy Shuchart:          Absolutely. And again, I do want to stress also this is not just a U.S. problem. This is a global problem, which is – makes it even worse, right?

Dan Ferris:                 Right. ["not in my backyard" ("NIMBY")] is everywhere, isn't it? Nobody wants to build one. No one wants to build a refinery.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. Exactly.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah, so it's Europe, it's wherever. Is it China? China doesn't seem to be afraid to build anything.

Tracy Shuchart:          No. No, they don't. They have plenty of teapot refineries as well as their state-run refineries. And so, they are not afraid of fossil fuels. Let's – they burn more coal than the rest of the world combined almost. So, I think – and speaking of coal, I would not be surprised if we see a resurgence in coal particularly in Southeast Asia. I think that all of those plans to sort of scrap coal are going to go by the wayside and we make a resurgence in demand particularly in that area, and then it's going to be more coal, maybe coal after this incident. So, just something to look at in that region.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. There's no energy transition, is there? It's just – we just add layers. People are still burning wood for heat in some places around the world.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. The only energy source we have not – we have stopped using is whale oil. That's it. Everything else we still use. And we just pile, pile, pile. Because look at how much our energy needs are growing globally. So, it's – we have – the world has an insatiable appetite for energy.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, there was a really cool thing, kind of a cool statistical thing. A guy – I forget his name, Jeff something or other. I want to say he was from Morgan Stanley or Goldman or something – maybe Goldman, not too long ago looked at like the – I want to say $4 trillion over the prior decade or so that was invested in renewables, and the needle had not moved on the global share of hydrocarbons. It was still 83% or something. It hadn't moved in a decade – $4 trillion.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah. It moved, I think, a half a percent, 1% or something like that. I saw that report as well, which is just saying – it just goes to show you how big the needs are. I don't think – I think that it's hard for some people to grasp just how much energy people consume. And we still have many places that still don't have access to electricity, believe it or not. Some countries in Africa, you still have a rather large portion of the population that doesn't even have that. So –

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, it's close to a billion, I think, still.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah, which was quite incredible.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that is amazing. Yeah. That's actually a great point. We use more energy. There are people who don't have access to it. And you can't get – you just can't get the standard of living that is visible in your background in my background and what we're doing right now without fossil fuels nowadays.

Tracy Shuchart:          A hundred percent.

Dan Ferris:                 Did you ever read a book by Vaclav Smil called The Way the World Really Works?

Tracy Shuchart:          I have not read that one.

Dan Ferris:                 It's awesome. I highly recommend it. I think you in particular would love it. There's a section in there about the ingredients of this modern standard of living, the basic ingredients, and there were four of them that he highlighted: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. Basically ammonia for fertilizers because that's – 50% of the world's population is eating food based on that. So, maybe four billion people wouldn't exist without ammonia, something like that. And cement and all of it. You get hydrocarbons either as feedstock and energy or just as energy source. So, you just can't do it. And you, Tracy, I think, or one of the people who put up the chart, that great chart that says there are no rich countries that aren't energy-rich. You did that, too, I think, at one –

Tracy Shuchart:          Yep, I put that – yeah, I put that up. There's no low-energy rich countries. And there aren't.

Dan Ferris:                 And we mentioned renewables a minute ago. They've become – grid-scale solar and wind have become a pet peeve of mine. I think they should – I don't know that we should be doing them. I don't think they work so well. And I think if we just built – why don't we build more nuclear for God's sake?

Tracy Shuchart:          Preach. I'm with you 100%.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. I just don't get it.

Tracy Shuchart:          I think that we should. The issue that some people – we are beginning to see changes in that, particularly from Europe, who is very anti-, anti-, [anti-nuclear]. But – and I think we're starting to see a global change. We have more projects in the pipeline globally. The problem is that they just take time. It's not as easy as building pipeline for nat gas and a data center could plug into the pipeline, bypass the utility companies, which is something they're discussing right now. Nuclear certainly would be great. It's clean. Everybody – the technology is far more advanced than what we were building in the 1950s. But again, those projects are big projects. They take time and they're also subject to permitting issues and not in my backyard issues. And so, we need to streamline the bureaucracy that is involved in all of these projects.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah. That Belfield Refinery that we discussed sure highlighted that. It's [a] lousy choice of a site. But still, they're – it's a case study in why we don't build things.

Tracy Shuchart:          Why we have issues.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, we do have issues. And another piece of this energy rabbit hole in the United States that I haven't gotten deep into this one is transmission and distribution. We looked at – we shorted a solar stock called SolarEdge [Technologies] and made a quick 50% on it a while ago, a couple years ago in our newsletter. And we got into some of it then but I was like, "Oh. Oh, oh, oh." So, solar, you have to put it out in wherever, the middle of hardly anywhere, and it requires much more grid connect, many more grid connections. It takes up 100 to 1,000 times more room per nameplate, generate gigawatt or whatever, megawatt, and the capacity factor's, like, 20%.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah, I mean –

Dan Ferris:                 So, your gigawatt is really 200 megawatts.

Tracy Shuchart:          I think the efficiency rate of solar panels is 12%, which is –

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, state of the art is, like, 25%. The cutting bleeding edge is worse efficiency than the crappiest coal plant.

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. Which is mind-blowing. And I think solar has its place. If you want to live off-grid and have solar, solar has its place. I have no opposition to it whatsoever. It's just –

Dan Ferris:                 It's a lifesaver in the middle of Africa. I mean –

Tracy Shuchart:          There you go. Our grids aren't built for it. Look at Europe, all the problems that they're having right now because they've got grid overload. So, they actually have to shut their grids down when there's too much solar.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Tracy Shuchart:          Nothing's built for it. It's intermittent. You certainly can't run a data center on it. And so –

Dan Ferris:                 I would bet – if not, it's cool, but I would bet that somebody like you has a viewpoint possibly similar to mine on LCOE, levelized cost of energy, a big pet peeve of mine. So, levelized cost of energy, the calculation that they do to show you how much cheaper solar is than natural gas or whatever, and it doesn't have any of this other stuff that we're talking about. It doesn't have dispatchability or reliability or any of that. It drives me nuts, this stuff.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah. Exactly, it doesn't factor in what you need to actually get it to the grid, running properly. And quite frankly, everybody talks about battery storage and things of that nature, but it's just not commercially viable right at this point.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah, the batteries, grid scale. As far as I can tell, you're lucky to get 12 hours.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 I'm like, "OK, well, 12 hours is good."

Tracy Shuchart:          It's just inefficient or for wide-scale commercial use.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Right. And like you say, it has its place. Like my neighbors have it on their roof and their meter runs backwards sometimes. They sell the power to the utility or whatever. Hey, cool. Great. Love it. But shoving it down our throats on grid scale is not turning out well.

Tracy Shuchart:          No.

Dan Ferris:                 But it's for – and I think maybe – were you the one who in your diesel piece pointed out that the grid connects are basically four or five years everywhere in the country. You have to wait at least four or five years and it was, like, six or seven in Virginia. Was that you?

Tracy Shuchart:          Yes, I actually – I did a presentation at the New Orleans Investment Conference in November 2024, I believe, and I was talking about it then. I mean, we don't have – we have so many issues with upgrading our grid right now. We have transformer backups. We don't have anything that we need to upgrade the grid in any way, shape, or form right now just for data centers alone. I think that's why, again, they are looking to just tap into pipelines, which we don't have enough of. But there's a lot of issues –

Dan Ferris:                 Can't build those either, can you?

Tracy Shuchart:          Just getting those – getting grid infrastructure, there's a backup of parts everywhere. So, years.

Dan Ferris:                 Yep. Backups on turbines, backups on transmission. It's an interesting place where we've come up against, I feel like we've financialized the hell out of ourselves and now we're running into the laws of physics. We've financialized ourselves right up to the wall.

Tracy Shuchart:          Exactly. And now, we're trying to become a manufacturing hub again, but [we're] slow on the update.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. And we are a big manufacturer still, but not what it – not what we ought to be by this point in time. And to play catch up on that seems – it's – in the United States of America, in the year 2026, trying to build anything is just too hard. I guess we've said that 10 different ways but –

Tracy Shuchart:          Right. But it's true.

Dan Ferris:                 – it needs more saying. I don't know. Yeah. Wow. OK. So, you wrote about – we mentioned Cresud, was one company that you wrote about. What was the other one? There was a South American stock that you wrote about and – Cresud's ticker symbol is what? C-R-E-S-Y? I've known about that one for –

Tracy Shuchart:          CRESY. I always call it "Cressy." I don't know if that –

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah, "Cressy." That's right. Me too. Yeah. And what was the other one?

Tracy Shuchart:          And AGRO. AGRO.

Dan Ferris:                 A-G-R-O?

Tracy Shuchart:          A-G-R-O, yeah, which is the ticker symbol. It's Adecoagro.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Were they the fertilizer? Are they a fertilizer company in Brazil? Or what?

Tracy Shuchart:          So, there are fertilizer in South America. And "Cressy" is agriculture. I am slowly looking more and more in South America because I think that there is going to be a lot of opportunity there. We have governments sort of changing. I think that we're going to be more focused on this hemisphere. So, to speak, and so, I think there are a lot of opportunities in South America right now.

Dan Ferris:                 All right. And that's two of them we've named. I feel like I can't let you get away without talking to you about gold. You've written about gold. You've written about gold miners. Are there any gold miners that you like that you care to talk about? We know all the usual suspects, Newmont and Barrick and folks like that. Is there anybody else that you want to talk about? And is there a viewpoint that you'd like to share with our viewers, where you are in gold right now?

Tracy Shuchart:          Well, I think that everybody – I think after we had that big sell-off earlier, we bounced back considerably, but we made a parabolic move at that very end that you often see that I personally am – I love gold. I am bullish gold far and far, far, far, far out. So, for me personally, I like to see parabolic moves that have a pullback, a decent pullback. I know everybody's like, "OK, gold is dead." No, it's not. I think we have – it has very much further to run over years. So, I am still a huge gold fan. I think that we did see gold miners kind of take a hit. Silver miners as well. But I think now is a good time to start looking at them once again. I don't really have any on my radar to share right this second, but I will definitely write a piece about it.

Dan Ferris:                 All right. And I will be a reader of that piece. What is your – you said you're bullish gold out into the distant future, it sounds like.

Tracy Shuchart:          Yes.

Dan Ferris:                 And so, you'll own it, you plan to own it for a long time. Why?

Tracy Shuchart:          Correct. Well, I don't think the situation is changing in the world, and I think the more and more – central banks were sellers of gold for the longest time up until about 2009 – '08, '09, '10, and then they started buying. And then, that was really exacerbated in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and we froze Russia's assets and everybody went, "Oh, no. Well, what if they do that to us? So, we're going to buy."

                                    And so, we just had China's latest report for March came out. They bought five tons, the most in 17 months. You now have Poland starting to buy. You now have Italy starting to buy. Now you have European countries starting to buy. They're looking at us as maybe we're not the reliable partner, at least right now, right this second, I think a little bit. And so, I think you're going to see more people and central banks go into gold. So, fundamental demand picture I don't think is going to slow down anytime soon. And I think we're inflating our way to Nowheresville and I think that we're just – believe it or not, we're just starting to see retail investors really get involved. Not – I've been a gold fan for years, but that was a very small corner of, as you know, the world, so to speak. Not a lot of people were looking at gold and saying, "Yeah, I want to own – physically own gold."

                                    And so, I think since 2022 we are seeing more kind of the retail crowd saying, "Hmm, maybe I should own some gold." And I think global debt is not going away anytime soon. Nobody has any desire to – you can't get elected if you want to balance the budget. Right?

Dan Ferris:                 Nobody can collect it on austerity. That's right. Nobody – that's a nonstarter for every voter on Earth. Yeah.

Tracy Shuchart:          Exactly. And so, the more debt, the more you're kind of inflating your money away. And so, I think there's a million fundamental reasons to own gold. And I know – I'm not saying anything bad about crypto or bitcoin or anything like that. I think great. If you want to own that as an alternative asset, that's great as well. But I still like the physical metals.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Now, Tracy, when I first learned about you years ago now – I'm starting to remember when I first discovered you on Twitter, it was – if I remember correctly, it was as a sort of practicing commodity trader.

Tracy Shuchart:          That's how I started. Yes.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Are you still actively trading commodities?

Tracy Shuchart:          I'm more commodity equities now, is really my focus. But I did start – I kind of started my career at the Chicago Board of Trade. So – and I worked on the floor for a little bit there. I worked at – well, my first job was at a brokerage. Smiling and dialing was my very first job. And then kind of worked my way up and managed a trade desk on the trade floor for a while. And then kind of got into more of the equity side of commodities world. But yeah, my whole background is in commodities.

Dan Ferris:                 OK, so you're a commodity-focused, equity – commodity equity-focused person. That's cool. And your two – and right now the two that we just talked about were CRESY, C-R-E-S-Y, and AGRO, A-G-R-O. South American commodity-oriented firms. Actually, a friend of mine. Marko Papic was – I don't know where he is today on this, but he was – he kind of turned me on to Chile and Chilean-focused commodity equities. Maybe I need to go revisit that. Well, how do you feel about Chile?

Tracy Shuchart:          So, I – Chile is great. It's a very U.S.-friendly country as well. Our governments get along very well. So, there wouldn't be any issue, so to speak, political issues. Obviously, you when you're investing in particularly South America you always have to make sure that political – be aware of the political issues as well, kind of like Africa. If you're investing in minds in Africa. Africa, you have to know kind of what the geopolitical risks are involved in each country. But Chile is a great country.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Foreign Markets 101. Make sure you understand the jurisdiction. All right. Well, it is time for our final question, which is the same for every guest, no matter what the topic. Even if it's a non-financial topic, it's the same identical question. The question is for our listeners' sake. If you could leave them with a single takeaway today, a single thought, what would you like that to be?

Tracy Shuchart:          I think really right now, I think commodities are the place to be right now. I don't think that's going away any time soon. In the world of financialization of everything, I think people are going to start looking more and more towards hard assets. And I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity there, particularly since those sectors have been disregarded for kind of for so long and are generally lower weightings in the S&P, for example. But I do think right now, I think – I know everybody throws around the term commodity super cycle, and I hate to use that term because it's thrown around too much, but I do think that the opportunities for commodities is right now and for the next 10, 15 years at least.

Dan Ferris:                 All right, I think I called it a megacycle once. So, you're good, believe me. But thank you for that. And thanks for being here, Tracy. I was really looking forward to talking to you and you did not disappoint. And I really appreciate it.

Tracy Shuchart:          Thank you. Such a pleasure.

Dan Ferris:                 Hey, that was fun. I love Tracy. I think she's really smart. I read her research, which is called Renegade Resources and her research is really highly detailed. She's really technical. She gets down the rabbit hole. And I was like, "Well, I want to have her on the show, but I don't know if she's going to be a good talker." But she's a great talker and she doesn't bog us down with lots of details. But she obviously is very, very knowledgeable.

                                    So, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did because I just wanted to hear her talk about the Strait of Hormuz and gold and diesel and oil and refineries and Europe and Chile and South America and all of it. Her mind is just full of information about commodities in a global context. And she mentioned two her favorite stocks: CRESY, C-R-E-S-Y is the ticker, and AGRO is the other ticker, A-G-R-O. Both South American-based commodity companies. Around Stansberry we've known about CRESY for a long time. My former colleague, Steve Sjuggerud, knew the folks who ran that firm. He probably still knows them. I haven't checked in with him for a while. But yeah, so we know that one and we know it's a really good company. CRESY: C-R-E-S-Y. Don't know as much about AGRO but you'd better believe I'll be looking into it now.

                                    So, that was great. I hope you took notes and I hope you also understand the main point there that she made at the end. You've really got to own commodities in some form these days. I don't think you can afford not to do so. And that's what – I've written about just one part of one of my commodity theses at nextenergyshock2026.com. That is mostly about the crisis that I see coming in the diesel fuel market. And in the wider refining market, but that's mostly focused on diesel. And we get into a few other topics there, but there's a lot of detail and a lot of research and it's all about how the regulatory environment has just destroyed our capacity in refining, among other things, in the energy space. Nextenergyshock2026.com is where you'll find that.

                                    And if you read The Ferris Report, you know all this stuff. You know that I'm into commodities. I've written about gold and all kinds of weird commodities too. Well, the refiners are a little weird. In the next issue of The Ferris Report, I'm going to write about hydrogen and helium and oxygen and other weird things that you don't even think about as being commodities that are necessary to maintain our standard of living. There's a lot here. Tracy is a great resource. You'd better believe I'm going to invite her back on the show. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Another great interview, another great episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. And remember, click like, click subscribe, and sign up for our free daily e-mail.

Announcer:                 Opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Stansberry Research, its parent company, or affiliates.

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