Porter Stansberry launched Porter & Co. in May 2022. The first pitch he put out was about a natural gas company he called the “Gods of Gas.” Four years later, it is still in every portfolio he promotes. The 1776 Moment, the 2026 AI Playbook, the Final Melt-Up All-In Playbook, the Silicon Dollar. Same company, same conviction, same name. The Porter Stansberry dossier covers the independent-research career that produced this kind of conviction-led positioning.

The pitch sounds like a standard energy recommendation. The story behind it is one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds in the modern energy sector, and Stansberry was one of the few publishers who understood what was happening before the market caught on.

The Company Before the Rice Brothers

The company is a 130-year-old Appalachian natural gas producer. It traces its roots to Equitable Resources, a Pittsburgh utility that spent the 1990s and 2000s pivoting from gas distribution into shale drilling. By 2017, it was the largest natural gas producer in the United States, sitting on roughly one million net acres in the Marcellus Shale, the richest natural gas formation in North America.

Being the biggest did not mean being the best. The company had a utility’s culture, layers of middle management, and a cost structure that ranked among the highest in the Appalachian Basin. It drilled some of the longest horizontal wells ever attempted in shale, pushing past 18,000 feet, and the technology broke down at those extremes. In 2018, the company announced it would spend $300 million more than planned and produce 3 percent less gas than promised. The stock fell 42 percent in a year.

The board fired the CEO who had engineered the acquisition that was supposed to fix everything. The new CEO, Robert McNally, inherited a mess.

The Rice Brothers

Three brothers started Rice Energy in 2007. Daniel Rice IV, Toby Rice, and Derek Rice. They were in their late twenties and early thirties. Their father, Daniel Rice III, had spent decades as a portfolio manager at BlackRock, running energy and natural resources funds. The sons grew up around the industry.

Rice Energy went public in 2014 and grew fast. The brothers ran a lean operation that drilled quickly, kept costs low, and used proprietary software to schedule operations with a precision the larger Appalachian producers could not match. By the time Rice Energy was acquired in November 2017 for $6.7 billion, the brothers had delivered Marcellus well costs of roughly $750 per foot, while the company that bought them was spending $1,000 to $1,250 per foot on the same geology.

The brothers took 80 percent of their merger payment in stock rather than cashing out, a decision that signaled their confidence in the combined company. Within thirteen months, they were writing letters to the board.

The Proxy Battle

On December 10, 2018, Toby and Derek Rice filed a letter with the SEC. The letter said the company was underperforming, the stock was depressed, and the assets were being mismanaged. They had a plan to generate $400 to $600 million in additional annual free cash flow by cutting well costs to $750 per foot, widening well spacing to 1,000 feet, and applying the operational software they had built at Rice Energy.

The board rejected the proposal. The Rices asked for Toby to be installed as CEO with operational authority. The board said no.

What followed was a nine-month proxy contest that became the most prominent board fight in the energy sector since Starboard Value took over Darden Restaurants in 2014. The brothers owned 3 percent of the stock and needed institutional support to win. T. Rowe Price, the company’s largest shareholder, backed them, with D.E. Shaw, Kensico Capital, and Elliott Management following. Both major proxy advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services and Egan-Jones, recommended their slate.

On July 10, 2019, the vote happened at a shareholder meeting in Pittsburgh. Seven Rice nominees and five incumbents they supported won seats on the twelve-member board, each with more than 80 percent of the vote. Toby Rice was named CEO. He was thirty years old. Analysts at the time could not recall a comparable transition at a major American exploration and production company.

What the Rice Brothers Actually Did

The plan they pitched during the proxy fight was specific. Cut Marcellus well costs from $1,000 to $750 per foot. Widen inter-well spacing from 750 to 1,000 feet to improve estimated ultimate recovery by roughly 10 percent. Drill fewer wells per year with longer laterals. Reduce the 170 Bcfe of annual production being curtailed by midstream constraints. Install the digital planning system they had built at Rice Energy.

By the first quarter of 2020, nine months after taking over, well costs in the Pennsylvania Marcellus had dropped to $745 per foot. By the second quarter, they hit $680. Full-year 2020 costs averaged $675 per foot, below the $735 target the brothers had set. The cost reduction from the pre-merger level of $1,250 to $675 is a 46 percent improvement. That is the number Stansberry cites when he talks about the Gods of Gas.

Free cash flow told the same story. In 2019, the year of the proxy fight, the company generated $60 million in free cash flow. Under Rice management, that number reached $325 million in 2020, then $935 million in 2021, and nearly $2 billion in 2022. The company returned $1.7 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks that year. Total proved reserves hit 25 Tcfe. The after-tax present value of future cash flows was estimated at $40 billion.

The renegotiated gas gathering agreement with Equitrans Midstream secured $535 million in near-term fee relief and a lower long-term fee structure. The “Big Water Network,” a 45-mile water infrastructure system built to support West Virginia operations, drove well costs there down to $700 per foot. The brothers called themselves the “shalennials” and framed the transformation as a technology story. The software they had built at Rice Energy to schedule drilling, manage logistics, and connect field operations to headquarters became the backbone of the new operating model.

Why Stansberry Latched On

Stansberry recommended this company when Porter & Co. launched in May 2022. The stock had already run hard from its 2018 lows, the proxy fight was three years in the rearview mirror, and the cost transformation was proven. What Stansberry saw was a company that had become the lowest-cost producer of a commodity the world was going to need more of, not less.

The thesis has three layers. Natural gas is the bridge fuel for AI data centers, which need 24/7 baseload power that solar and wind cannot provide and nuclear cannot deliver on a relevant timeline. The company sits on the largest low-cost reserve base in the country. And the management team that built the cost advantage is still running the show. The credit-cycle bubble thesis argues that the data center buildout driving that demand is itself financed by mispriced debt.

The “Gods of Gas” name is Stansberry’s. It refers to the Rice brothers, specifically, and the company they rebuilt. The framing matters. Stansberry is making a bet on management as much as geology. He has said this is one of the most profitable positions he has ever put in front of his readers. He has repeated that claim in every promo since 2022. The company has appeared in four separate promotional packages across four years. The gold deflation warning connects commodity exposure like this to the macro cycle Stansberry now sees turning.

The Thesis in Context

The turnaround is real and documented in SEC filings. The cost reductions are verified. The free cash flow growth is on the income statement. The Rice brothers delivered what they promised during the proxy fight, and they did it faster than their own projections.

The future depends on how several variables line up. Natural gas is a cyclical commodity, and the company is a producer rather than a toll road. When gas prices fall, the lowest-cost producer hurts less than the competition, but it still hurts. The AI data center demand thesis adds a demand layer onto a commodity business — the demand story and the commodity economics run together. The chokepoint framing Stansberry uses for this pick maps onto cost-advantage positioning rather than a structural moat. A natural gas producer competes on cost, and in extractive industries the cost position is tied to inventory quality as the best acreage gets drilled first.

The brothers have been direct about this. Their strategy has been to use free cash flow to buy back stock, pay down debt, and acquire adjacent acreage. The Tug Hill acquisition in late 2022 added 90,000 core acres and 11 years of inventory. The Equitrans Midstream merger in 2023 brought the gathering infrastructure in-house, vertically integrating the business and reducing per-unit costs further. These are the moves of an operator that understands its commodity exposure and is working to structuralize its advantage.

Stansberry’s conviction in this company is the longest-running call in the Porter & Co. catalog. That conviction plays out through two variables: whether natural gas demand from AI data centers materializes at the scale he projects, and whether the Rice brothers maintain their cost edge as the inventory ages. The track record is the documented cost transformation and the free cash flow it produced. The commodity cycle is the variable the management team is structuralizing against. His 2029 monetary reset thesis is the macro framing that sits behind picks like this one. More Porter Stansberry files are collected in the guru dossier hub.