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How AI will disrupt the global natural gas trade
Last month, Alberta Premier Daniel Smith spoke at the Pacific Northwest Economic Regions’ 2026 PNWER forum explaining the Alberta government’s current approach to adding value to Alberta’s natural gas at home. She described it as the concept of a “digital pipeline and digital refinery.”
“We’re taking the material (natural gas),” Smith said. “We’re turning the gas molecules into zeros and ones, and then we’ll be able to export zeros and ones a little bit more easily because fibre optic lines and wireless seem to be a lot easier to build internationally than it has been to build pipelines, and so that is going to allow us to have a whole new era of value added.”
With the Co-Founder and Head Writer of Doomberg scheduled to participate in a panel discussion at the Canadian Energy Executive Association CEEA 75 Energy Business Forum in Banff, Alberta, this week, I decided to interview one of the famously anonymous, collaborative team of analysts who operate the leading Substack newsletter known as Doomberg that is focused on energy markets, finance, and geopolitics.
Transforming natural gas to data for easy export – A not-so-new idea
I discovered that, collectively, Doomberg analysts have been talking about this concept of transforming natural gas into data for easy export since Oct 2024, first discussed in their article “Bridge Burning-How AI will disrupt the global natural gas trade” .
In the article, the authors refer to the boom in energy-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is creating a scenario in the U.S. and other countries as the hunt for high-quality, reliable and cost-effective power is forcing companies to look for solutions beyond existing electricity and water infrastructure. They observe that nuclear implementation is just not going to be fast enough. They discussed how it is much cheaper to ship data around the world than to ship natural gas, and with natural gas being so cheap and abundant, they envisioned “large buildings where natural gas goes in one side, and data comes out the other”.
Alberta Clipper: A storm is brewing in the energy-rich Canadian province
Doomberg’s Head Writer then pointed out that since Canada is the biggest supplier of oil to the U.S, Doomberg analysts have long been interested in and written about Canadian energy and have done so with great prescience at times. In their Dec 2024 article “Alberta Clipper”, they covered Alberta’s opposition to the proposed federal greenhouse gas emissions cap with a colourful analysis of some of the political personalities and even published an election viewing guide.
“The essence of this dispute arises from Canada’s hapless and wildly unpopular Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and his obsession with being seen as caring about carbon emissions. The proposed federal law in question would force Alberta to significantly reduce oil and gas production to meet the proposed CO2 targets. Trudeau’s point person on the initiative is former Greenpeace activist and current Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, a deeply controversial figure not known for his grasp of physics or industry. In other words, the stage is set for a titanic clash of ideologies, with ramifications that spread well beyond Canada’s borders”.
“In Alberta Clipper,” the Doomberg writer said, “We foresaw the rise and installation of Mark Carney as Canadian Prime Minister before he was a contract that you could bet on in Polymarket. And then in a follow-up piece in April of 2025 called “The Fix Is In” we made a series of predictions about how this whole drama would unfold in the next 12 to 18 months, and we have been quite prescient in this regard. That’s not meant as a brag.”
A guiding thought in the Doomberg predictions was that Alberta needed to become “unstuck” to achieve North American energy dominance, but that a Liberal Prime Minister was what was needed to accomplish that feat because Canada “ had gone so far down the road on the climate and carbon, that a conservative government couldn’t do it. So in the same way that only Richard Nixon could have opened up China, you needed a dyed-in-the-wool WEF type”, or as they described Carney – “an Alberta Clipper in December of 2024”.
Doomberg articles also predicted pipelines would be built as well as major infrastructure projects, and that Canadian media would reduce emphasis on climate issues.
The New World’s Oil- A united Western Hemisphere could neutralize the Middle East.
With the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, countries like India, Thailand, and Vietnam in particular, now want 10 to 15 percent of their energy from sources other than the Middle East. I posed the following question to Doomberg: Can the U.S. and Canada offer speed, certainty and scale…collaborating to provide energy security? Can we achieve some semblance of North American energy dominance?
“Our views on Canada are part of a wider view of the Western Hemisphere,” he said. “In December of 2023, in an article called The New World’s Oil, we did a bottom-up analysis. We predicted the U.S. taking over Venezuela. That the U.S. would have to retreat from Asia and reconstitute using the resources of the Western Hemisphere was on our minds even before Trump became president, for the second time.”
As stated in the article:
“Nonetheless, the prospect of a united Western Hemisphere collaborating on a basis of mutual respect does present one particularly compelling prospect: it would create a global energy behemoth… Combining the technical prowess of the major Western oil companies with the huge swaths of undeveloped hydrocarbons south of the equator represents a generational opportunity for wealth creation and strategic advancement for all parties. The numbers are staggering—let’s do a little daydreaming.”
Maureen McCall is an energy professional who writes on issues affecting the energy industry.
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COMMENTARY – DOOMBERG – Geopolitical & Energy Predictions with Amazing Prescience – Maureen McCall