While everyone’s glued to oil prices screaming past $100, the smarter money is watching something else entirely: liquefied natural gas. And one company in particular is sitting in the catbird seat.
Venture Global (NYSE: VG) is a name most retail investors have never heard. That’s about to change. The US LNG producer has 30% of its output unhedged and available to sell on the spot market — right as global gas prices are going vertical. European natural gas jumped 70% in a single week after the Iran conflict disrupted Middle Eastern supply routes. The spread between US Henry Hub and European benchmarks has blown out to $15/MMBtu. For context, management has said that every $1 move in that spread swings full-year EBITDA by $575 million to $625 million.
Do the math. Venture Global guided for $5.2 billion to $5.8 billion in 2026 EBITDA — and that was before the conflict began. With spot spreads now triple the levels baked into those estimates, the actual number could come in dramatically higher. Yet the stock trades at just 9.6 times forward earnings, according to UBS. The market hasn’t caught up.
What makes Venture different from peers like Cheniere Energy is speed and structure. Founded a decade ago by former banker Mike Sabel, the company pioneered modular LNG plant construction. Its Calcasieu Pass facility went from investment decision to first cargo in just 29 months — a record for the industry. That cost advantage translates directly into margin. Venture plans to become the second-largest US LNG producer, with 90% of total capacity sold on long-term contracts and the remaining slice exposed to spot upside.
There are risks. Net debt sits at 5x EBITDA, which is heavy. And lingering lawsuits from 2022 — when the company rerouted contracted cargoes to higher-paying spot buyers during the Ukraine crisis — remain a cloud. But recent arbitration wins against Shell and Repsol have cleared much of the legal uncertainty.
The bottom line: the Iran war has handed US LNG producers a structural windfall. Venture Global is the most leveraged to it, and the market hasn’t priced it in. At under 10x earnings with a potential EBITDA blowout quarter ahead, this is the kind of asymmetric setup that gets value investors interested.
