Credibility in Energy Is Earned in the Downturns

As I write this in August 2026, oil is trading in the low 80s and no one agrees on where it goes next. In the past year alone the price has swung from the high 50s to nearly 120 dollars a barrel. Supply is tightening, geopolitical risk is climbing, and traders are bracing for the next move in either direction. This is the part of the cycle most people find hardest to read. It is not a crash and it is not a boom. It is uncertainty, and uncertainty is where discipline either shows up or it does not.

I have built my career on a simple conviction: energy is cyclical, confidence is not, and the gap between the two is where opportunity lives. When oil collapses, the reserves are still in the ground, the infrastructure still stands, and the people who know how to run it are still there. What disappears is capital. That gap, between what an asset is worth and what anyone is willing to fund, is where I work.

I did not come to energy investing through a finance program or an institutional desk. I came up through the industry itself. I learned how production actually moves, how fast downtime turns into lost revenue, and how cash flow behaves when the commodity price swings out from under you. That ground level experience shaped how I read risk long before I ever deployed a dollar of capital.

The first real test.

My first real test came in 2008. Oil had run to a record high above 145 dollars a barrel that summer, then collapsed to around 30 dollars by year end. Projects were shelved, lenders pulled back, and companies were liquidating equipment for pennies on the dollar. The consensus was to wait it out. I took the opposite view, because oil and gas has never stayed down for long. I began acquiring distressed equipment at the bottom, moving it into markets where demand was still strong, and putting every dollar back to work buying more. As prices recovered over the following years, producers who suddenly needed equipment on short notice had almost nowhere else to turn. That is how Inclusive Energy grew from nothing into one of Western Canada's leading equipment suppliers.

The pattern repeated in 2020.

The pattern repeated in 2020. When oil briefly traded below zero for the first time in history, most of the industry decided the sector was finished. I did what I had done in 2008. I moved capital toward producers everyone else had walked away from, on terms built around their assets rather than a rigid lending template.

Capital structured around the asset.

That thinking is the foundation of what I do today through Global Centurion Investments and Inclusive Energy. Strong producers get turned away by traditional lenders in every downturn, not because the assets are weak, but because they do not fit a standard credit box. I structure capital around the asset itself, using debt, equity, royalty interests, and prepay production models, alongside In House Financing, Lease to Own, and Rent to Own on the equipment side. Risk is shared with the operator instead of dumped on them, and incentives are aligned around production actually performing.

Operating across Calgary and Dubai lets me connect international investors and a family office network with Canadian producers who are strongest at exactly the moments the market overlooks them. That flow of patient capital into real assets is what carries good operators through the cycles.

Credibility is earned when it is hard.

Which brings me back to a market like this one. Low 80s, pulled in both directions by forces no one controls, with plenty of people waiting for certainty that may never arrive. I have never operated on certainty. I operate on conviction, discipline, and a read on real assets that only comes from having worked the field. Credibility in this business is not earned when prices are high and everyone looks smart. It is earned when the market is hard to read and someone still has the judgment to act. That is where I have built every part of what I do, and it is how I intend to keep building.