Natural Gas Growth and Power Demand in the Context of AI

Our analysts Ariana Salvatore, Stephen Byrd and Devin McDermott discuss President Trump’s four executive orders around energy policy and how they could reshape the sector.

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Ariana Salvatore: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Ariana Salvatore, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Public Policy Strategist.

Stephen Byrd: And I'm Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley's Head of Research Product for the Americas and Global Head of Sustainability Research.

Devin McDermott: And I'm Devin McDermott, Head of North American Energy Research.

Ariana Salvatore: Our topic today looms large in investors minds. We'll be digging into how the new policies proposed under President Trump's administration will fundamentally reshape energy markets.

It's Tuesday, February 4th at 10am in New York.

On his first day in office, President Trump declared a national energy emergency. He issued four key executive orders, setting out a sweeping plan to maximize oil and gas production. All of this on top of stepping back in tangible ways from the Biden administration's clean energy plans. We think these orders can have a significant impact on the future of energy, one of Morgan Stanley's four key themes for 2025.

So, Stephen, let's start there. One of the biggest questions is which segments of the power and AI theme stand to benefit the most, and which ones will be the most challenged?

Stephen Byrd: Yeah, Ariana, I'd say the two biggest beneficiaries will be natural gas and nuclear, probably in that order. And in terms of challenges, I do think, wind, especially offshore wind, will be quite challenged. So, when I think about natural gas, it's very clear that we have an administration that's very pro natural gas.

And natural gas is also going to need to be part of the power mix for data centers. It's flexible. It could be built relatively quickly. There are a lot of locational options that are perfect here. So, I do think natural gas is a winner.

On nuclear, we do think Republicans broadly, and also many Democrats, firmly support nuclear power. Nuclear is quite helpful, especially for larger data centers or supercomputers. They're large, there's a lot of land at these nuclear plants. And so, I would expect to see some very large data centers built at operational nuclear plants. And we do think the Trump administration will work hard to make that – from a regulatory point of view – make that happen.

I also think we'll see a lot of support at the federal level for new nuclear power plant construction, as well as bringing the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle back to the U.S. So those are a few of the areas that I would expect to do well.

Ariana Salvatore: Devin, same question for you on the energy sector. How are you thinking about the impacts?

Devin McDermott: Yeah, it's a good question, and there's a lot in these executive orders. I mean, some of the key things that we're focused on as impacting the sector include encouraging federal lands development and leasing for oil and gas activity, with a specific focus on Alaska. Resuming LNG permit authorizations, which lifts the ban that's been in place for the last year. Eliminating EV targets, including pausing some IRA funds tied to EVs. Broad support for infrastructure permitting, including pipelines. And then a broader review of environmental regulations, including some recent headlines that point to rolling back fuel efficiency and emission standards for cars and trucks – something that the prior Trump administration did as well.

The near-term financial impact to the industry of all this is fairly limited. But there are two key longer-term considerations. First, on the oil side, rolling back fuel efficiency standards and other environmental regulations doesn't stop the transition to lower carbon alternatives, but it does slow it. And in particular, it moderates the longer-term erosion of gasoline and diesel demand; and creates a backdrop where incumbent energy players have a longer runway to harvest cash from these legacy businesses and time to scale up profitable low carbon growth, which is still progressing, despite the policy changes.

And then second, gas is the biggest winner, building on some of Stephen's comments. The policy initiatives that we're seeing here are likely to support more LNG exports and more gas power generation relative to the status quo.

Ariana Salvatore: So, Devin, one of the things you mentioned there is regulation, and we think that's specifically reflected in this theme of unleashing American energy that Trump likes to talk about. It seems that this would set the stage for looser regulation and more supportive policy for oil and gas development.

Do you expect any meaningful changes in near-term investment levels or production growth across the industry?

Devin McDermott: It's an easy one, Ariana. No. The reality is the majority of U.S. oil and gas investment activity occurs on state or privately held lands. It's regulated at the state level. And the amount of investment that occurs across presidential election cycles really doesn't change all that much. And, in fact, some of the highest growth years ever for the U.S. oil and gas sector occurred under the Obama administration and also the most recent Biden term where production of both commodities actually hit all time highs.

So, when your baseline is things really aren't that bad, it's tough to do much that really accelerates the throttle and causes companies to add more activity or add more oil or gas drilling rigs. And the last thing I just say on this point is the sector is not funding constrained. There's adequate free cash flow; there's adequate investment capacity. And that also is another limiting factor on doing anything that positively influences willingness to spend capital.

In the end, it's really more about price – and where oil prices specifically goes as it relates to oil and gas investment – rather than policy.

Stephen Byrd: So, Ariana, let me move from Devin's thoughts on price back to policy – and if you take a step back, a key question that we often get asked is: Will the President's executive orders be fully implemented? What do you think?

Ariana Salvatore: Well, it's always necessary to frame these policy proposals in terms of their feasibility, right? So, we're still parsing through all of the details of these executive orders. But we already feel higher conviction in some areas over others, where we think the president has clear and present authority to make policy changes.

For example, President Trump can pretty easily unilaterally decide to move away from Biden's clean energy targets, but he's going to have a much harder time rescinding money that has already been appropriated, dispersed, or obligated towards these ends. For example, through the Inflation Reduction Act. We think that process is going to be much longer and likely result in a very targeted repeal as opposed to a broad-based claw back of funds.

Stephen Byrd: Just thinking about sequencing, can you talk more about, sort of, the potential specific sequencing of these policies?

Ariana Salvatore: There are a few different balls in the air right now, so to speak, as we noted in the run up to the inauguration. We expected President Trump to focus first on the areas that are more within his unilateral control as president. So, that really comes down to tariffs and trade policy more broadly, as well as immigration.

I would also put deregulation in that bucket, but more on a sector specific basis. So, as we've talked about, we think there's clear deregulatory tailwinds for the energy sector. It's also clear in financials. But across the board, these are going to have more limited success in the energy complex.

But Stephen, back to you, given everything that we've been talking about, how do you see the future of clean energy, renewables, EVs – all these elements that make up the Inflation Reduction Act and the broader energy transition?

Stephen Byrd: Yeah, as I think about the areas that are most at risk, I think it's very clearly electric vehicles as well as wind power. Both have been, the subject of direct criticism and we would expect a high risk of elimination or reduction of support there. So that will cause some issues. I would say especially offshore wind faces multiple issues and we think the growth outlook is now very challenged.

Now that said, onshore wind is often, for example, done on private land rather than public land, and the economics in many locations for both wind and solar remain quite favorable. And I think a big area of underappreciated upside would be AI itself – in the sense that the hyperscalers have very significant zero carbon emissions goals. So, what we see happening is we think these hyperscalers over time as they build out more and more data centers, which do have very high carbon footprints, we do think these hyperscalers are going to engage in power contracts with new renewable projects. So that is a boost to demand that I think the market is really not well appreciating.

Ariana Salvatore: And finally, let's consider the issue of powering data centers. Devin, you've spoken about your positive outlook for natural gas. Do you think natural gas is going to play a bigger role in powering large U.S. data centers?

Devin McDermott: Yeah, we do, and there's been an uptick in natural gas related announcements as it relates to data center growth in the U.S. over the last few months. And more recently, we've actually seen some very large deals; plus carbon capture which addresses some of the emissions concerns that Stephen was mentioning before – that the hyperscalers have longer term.

It's important to contextualize this, though, with the broader growth backdrop for natural gas. The market here domestically is on the cusp of what we see as a structural growth cycle driven really by two key pillars. The first of which is that rise in LNG exports that I was alluding to before, where we're on track to roughly double U.S. export capacity over the next five years. And the second pillar is power. And power has a lot of different subsets to it. It's onshore manufacturing, it's this broader trend of electrification, like more electric appliances, a little bit from EVs. Some underlying industrial activity growth and then data centers in AI.

So that is meaningful. That's a lot of gas, but there's also a lot more in all the other buckets I talked about.

Ariana Salvatore: Stephen, pivoting back to you, beyond natural gas, how do you see this theme of powering AI developing more broadly under the new Trump energy policies?

Stephen Byrd: Yeah, you know, I think broadly what we see is that a number of debottlenecking technologies are going to become very important. We cannot get enough power for data centers that we need really over the next several years. So, we're going to need to be very creative.

One option will be to build data centers at large nuclear power plants. I think we'll definitely see that. We will also, I think, see converting bitcoin sites into data centers. That's going to be quite popular. And then lastly, I do think electric transmission will see excellent growth. That is certainly one way to try to debottleneck the grid – is to increase the grid itself.

That takes many years, but I do think there will be more and more willpower. Both at the federal and state level to provide incentives for electric transmission. So that's an asset class that's definitely a winner.

Ariana Salvatore: Last question for both of you, Stephen. I know we're going to hear from you in an upcoming episode about the implications of DeepSeek, but just to get a little bit of a sneak peek here. I'd love a quick take on how you're thinking about DeepSeek.

Stephen Byrd: It's really quite jarring in a week to go from a $500 billion U.S. AI plan to a LLM with a reported price tag of just $6 million. I come away bullish on power demand, and let me walk through why that is. You know, I think that as the cost of inference drops, and we're seeing many signs of that – not just DeepSeek, but many other developments. As that happens, the absolute demand for inference compute goes up, and that compute requires a lot of electricity, so I'm quite bullish there.

Also on AI training, I think the market has gotten too negative. I think that what we'll see is continued LLM R&D to go to the next level of capability. And there are at least five U.S. companies who are going to spend in the tens of billions, possibly into the hundreds of billions of dollars each on training the next generation of Large Language Models, which could be much, much more capable than the current generation. So, I'm actually quite bullish on the outlook for power demand from AI.

Ariana Salvatore: Devin?

Devin McDermott: The news drove a big dislocation across the gas value chain and pullback in many exposed stocks. And we think those types of dips are a buying opportunity because the gas setup is constructive or compelling for many reasons. Power is one of them, but you're not paying for power in the stock prices today.

Ariana Salvatore: Stephen, Devin, thanks for taking the time to talk. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.