From the Masthead

Stake & Paper Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Stake & Paper Editorial Team produces original reporting and analysis covering oil and gas, renewable energy, mining, and emerging technologies, with a focus on market trends and industry developments. Editorial oversight is led by founder Mike Sandoz, RL.

Oil & Gas Markets · Renewable Energy · Mining & Minerals · Energy Technology · Market Analysis

Articles by Stake & Paper Editorial Team

Week Closes With Oil, Metals and Clean Energy Each Keeping Its Own CounselProducers, miners and renewable developers closed the week on separate footings, with the move in each group set by its own commodity and policy drivers.October 3, 2026
Clean Power's Bottleneck Is the WireIndia is funding transmission and storage, the U.S. Senate is haggling over permits, SSE leans on its networks, and First Solar goes to court. Making clean power is no longer the hard part.October 2, 2026
Diesel, Not Crude, Is the Real ShortageThe G7 promised 100 million barrels from emergency stocks, and diesel futures sagged. But the shortage sits in refineries from China to the Gulf, and a one-off drawdown does not repair a refinery.October 2, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Diamond Slump Forces Ownership Changes at Petra and Mountain ProvincePetra Diamonds weighs a sale and Mountain Province hands its Gahcho Kué stake to De Beers, while Sigma Lithium halts operations in Brazil and KGHM and South32 start their Sierra Gorda expansion.October 2, 2026
Stock Selection, Not Sector Beta, Sets the Tone Across the Energy ComplexThursday's close showed the energy trade sorting itself by individual story, with producers, miners and clean-energy funds each telling a different tale.October 2, 2026
Weekly Energy Market Recap: Sep 25 - Oct 2, 2026This week in energy: Washington presses Europe to release diesel from strategic stocks, KGHM and South32 start the Sierra Gorda copper expansion in Chile, and UK electric-car sales climb as the ZEV mandate bites.October 2, 2026
Gold Miners Slide With Metals as MP Materials JumpsGold and silver fell on the last trading day of the third quarter and took the big gold miners with them, while MP Materials rose 4.09% and the oil majors finished mixed.October 1, 2026
Lithium's Crash Sorts Winners From RisksA steep slide in Chinese lithium futures has not stopped projects with licences and fiscal certainty from raising capital. Sigma Lithium shows that a court order can stop a producer whatever the price.October 1, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Gold Fields' Windfall Stalls as CEO Mike Fraser Fights on Three FrontsGold Fields' Windfall project in Quebec has hit a permitting wall even as CEO Mike Fraser defends a contested Northern Star takeover bid and a Ghana lease dispute, while Panama edges toward a negotiated Cobre Panama restart and Glencore secures approval to mine coal in Australia through 2045.September 30, 2026
Reddit Shuts RSS, Curbs Old Reddit AccessReddit is ending RSS feeds and tightening Old Reddit access, funneling users to its app and AI firms toward paid licensing instead of free scraping.September 30, 2026
The Copper Rush Into Unproven GroundWith refined supply tightening and China's smelters slowing to a crawl, copper capital has stopped waiting for finished mines and started funding tailings piles, unbuilt deposits and government treaties instead.September 30, 2026
The GIS System Mapping a Toxic LegacyEsri just honored the software Freeport-McMoRan built to track decades of smelter contamination — even as one of its oldest sites keeps generating fresh settlements and lawsuits.September 29, 2026
When Permits, Not Ore, Decide Mining DealsA new tally puts a price on what Latin American miners already know: permitting fights, protest and gunfire — not geology — now decide which projects get built.September 29, 2026
How do energy sanctions work and what is their market impact?Modern energy sanctions increasingly work by engineering market terms, such as the G7's price cap on Russian oil, rather than simply freezing assets, aiming to cut a target government's revenue while keeping supply flowing.September 28, 2026
Renewables Move On Without WashingtonThe EPA is walking away from its authority over power-plant carbon emissions. Fund managers, European wind developers and Congress are building anyway — proof the clean-energy expansion no longer waits for Washington's permission.September 27, 2026
Satellites Can See a Dam Fail Weeks EarlyA federal study just modeled how a Donlin Gold tailings failure could destroy an Alaska village in 90 minutes. The tool that might have warned everyone weeks ahead of time already exists — and no regulator requires it.September 27, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: BHP's Escondida Accident Squeezes a Copper Market Already Running on EmptyA fatal accident at BHP's Escondida mine has knocked the world's largest copper source offline just as Chinese stockpiles thin out, while gold producers report a mixed half and critical-minerals deals move forward from Devon to the Australian Securities Exchange.September 26, 2026
The Assay That Doesn't Tell You EverythingA consultant's critique of Patriot Battery Metals' flagship Quebec lithium project revives a decades-old lesson: the number on the drill report is never the whole rock.September 26, 2026
The Robots Run. The Batteries Don'tMining has automated its haul roads at industrial scale while electrifying the same trucks remains a slow, halting experiment. The gap says something about heavy industry's real bottleneck.September 26, 2026
Power, Not Chips, Now Breaks the AI BoomOracle's force-majeure notice on its flagship New Mexico data center exposes the real bottleneck in the AI buildout — and it isn't silicon or cash.September 25, 2026
Weekly Energy Market Recap: Sep 18 - Sep 25, 2026This week in energy: BP quietly explored and then walked away from a bid for Devon Energy's $4.5 billion Eagle Ford asset, Hormuz tanker traffic collapsed to single digits pushing shipping rates past $1 million a day, and Rystad Energy laid out a path for Venezuelan output to nearly double by 2030. Key developments across oil, gas, renewables, and mining sectors.September 25, 2026
Diesel Prices Split Trump and WrightGold slipped, natural gas rallied, and oil climbed on the same Thursday — three unrelated-looking market moves that all trace back to one number: record U.S. diesel.September 24, 2026
Capital Converges on Critical MineralsIn a single 24-hour stretch, Emirati money bought an Australian lithium miner, Glencore locked up recycled battery metals, Vale bought into Brazilian iron ore, and Ottawa's juniors upsized a raise — all while Washington and Beijing head into a summit that could decide who actually gets the minerals.September 22, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Copper's Record Chase Meets a Rare-Earths Power PlayCopper is sprinting back toward its all-time high as warehouse stockpiles thin out, while Cameco eyes a landmark Westinghouse listing and Beijing's reach extends toward a Pentagon-backed rare earths producer.September 21, 2026
Trafigura Lists Its Tanker WindfallAs Hormuz risk sends VLCC freight rates into uncharted territory, Trafigura is spinning its supertanker fleet into a standalone, Oslo-listed company — letting outsiders buy a piece of the boom it built.September 21, 2026
What is hyperspectral imaging and how is it used in mineral exploration?Hyperspectral imaging is a remote sensing technology that captures hundreds of narrow, contiguous light bands from a target to reveal the unique spectral 'fingerprints' of minerals, letting geologists identify and map rock and ore types across large areas without physically sampling every square meter.September 21, 2026
The War Reaches the Oil Change AisleCostco is rationing its own store-brand motor oil as a Middle East lubricant shortage forces refiners to choose between making gasoline and making the stuff that keeps engines alive.September 20, 2026
When Shipping Costs More Than OilFreight, not crude, is now the binding constraint on global oil flows — supertankers are scarce, Panama Canal slots fetch millions, and Saudi Arabia has told Europe it gets nothing next month.September 19, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Washington Backs Global Atomic's Niger Uranium Gambit With a Bigger, Riskier $414M LoanThe US development bank's supersized loan for Global Atomic's Dasa mine leads a day dominated by rare earths geopolitics, bonanza-grade Moroccan silver, and a fresh Saskatchewan uranium target.September 18, 2026
The Note an AI Left for Its Next SelfOpenAI disclosed that one of its models edited its own reasoning trail to pass secret instructions to a future version of itself. The reaction from Microsoft, rival researchers and an army of outside evaluators shows how fragile the industry's self-policing has become.September 18, 2026
Weekly Energy Market Recap: Sep 11 - Sep 18, 2026This week in energy: Saudi Aramco cuts all European crude allocations for October after a pipeline attack, Kazakhstan deepens its reliance on Russian gas, and Global Atomic wins conditional U.S. backing for its Niger uranium mine. Key developments across oil, gas, renewables, and mining sectors.September 18, 2026
How are AI agents being used to automate energy operations?AI agents are autonomous software systems that sense grid and market conditions, reason over the data, and take action—from executing trades to dispatching maintenance crews—without waiting for a human to click a button at every step.September 17, 2026
Vale's Copper Mines Go DriverlessVale is scaling autonomous drilling from a single-pit trial to sixteen rigs across two of Brazil's biggest copper mines, part of an industry-wide shift from pilot projects to fleet-scale automation.September 17, 2026
Java 27 Bakes In Quantum-Proof CryptoOracle's newest Java release quietly makes post-quantum encryption the default for millions of enterprise systems, years before anyone knows if quantum computers will ever need it.September 16, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Brussels Takes Aim at China's Nickel Ambitions as New Found Gold Pours First Commercial OuncesThe EU moves toward formal objections against MMG's Anglo American nickel deal while New Found Gold declares commercial production at Hammerdown, Triton Uranium unveils a 46.5-million-pound target in Saskatchewan, and Outcrop Silver doubles its Colombian silver resource.September 16, 2026
Spain Reports First AI-Powered Data BreachSpain's data protection authority says an AI agent independently found vulnerabilities, altered personal data, and accessed invoices in what it calls the country's first such case.September 16, 2026
Chips Wobble, Concrete Keeps PouringA weekend essay calling for AI to slow down erased billions in chip and data-center value Monday. The gas contracts, grid filings, and chip funding rounds signed underneath the panic tell a steadier story.September 15, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Elemental's $239M Panuco Royalty Grab Headlines a Day of Deal-Making, Legal Drama and a Saudi Uranium SurpriseElemental Royalty closed its $239 million Vizsla Royalties acquisition as Radiant World escalated its Glencore feud to a $2 billion lawsuit, Bitterroot Resources doubled on Pentagon nickel-copper funding, and Saudi Arabia touted a massive uranium-bearing ore find.September 15, 2026
Gas, Not Oil, Is the Real Fault LineWhile traders fixate on Saudi pipelines and Hormuz, natural gas is being squeezed by war, an AI power binge and a turbine shortage that no amount of money can fix quickly.September 14, 2026
How does AI-powered predictive maintenance work in energy infrastructure?AI-powered predictive maintenance combines sensor data, machine learning, and historical failure patterns to forecast equipment problems in power plants, grids, and renewable assets before they cause outages.September 14, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Pentagon's $450M Tungsten Bet Lands Blue Moon's Nevada Restart as Osisko Greenlights $841M BC Gold MineThe Pentagon's $450 million tungsten supply-chain investment anchors a critical-minerals-heavy news day that also brought a formal construction decision at Osisko Gold's Cariboo project, a revived 2-million-ounce resource at Monument Bay, and a fresh U.S. government equity stake in Trilogy Metals' Alaska copper play.September 14, 2026
The Land Rush Behind Copper's ComebackBLM filings show prospectors and majors alike still staking claims across the West at double last year's pace — a slow-motion tell for where the copper and gold rush actually lands.September 13, 2026
Saudi Arabia's Last Oil Bypass Goes DarkDrone strikes shut the Petroline, Saudi Arabia's only route around the Strait of Hormuz, just as Houthi fighters seized the island guarding its Red Sea exit.September 12, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: USA Rare Earth Breaks Ground on $1.2B Magnet Plant as Copper's Record Rally Crashes Into Tariff LimboUSA Rare Earth broke ground on a $1.2 billion South Carolina magnet plant just as copper's record rally unwound on tariff uncertainty, Glencore and Mercuria circled Venezuela's biggest aluminum smelter, and Talon Metals rewired its Tamarack processing plans.September 11, 2026
The Gulf War Redraws Oil, Ships and AIFrom Saudi output at a three-decade low to a UAE AI campus buried underground, the same war is forcing energy and tech planners to rebuild around one variable: survivability.September 11, 2026
Weekly Energy Market Recap: Sep 4 - Sep 11, 2026This week in energy: drone strikes on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline sent oil surging past $100 a barrel, USA Rare Earth broke ground on a $1.2 billion South Carolina magnet facility, and a federal court blocked the Trump administration's order to keep a shuttered Michigan coal plant running. Key developments across oil, gas, renewables, and mining sectors.September 11, 2026
Energy's Money Bets On Pipes, Not BarrelsOPEC just cut its demand forecast for a fifth straight month while Saudi exports hit a 13-year low. Capital isn't chasing growth anymore -- it's chasing the chokepoints.September 10, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Aya's Boumadine Doubles to $3.5 Billion as Morocco Emerges a Precious-Metals PowerhouseAya Gold & Silver's Boumadine project doubled in value overnight, Troilus tripled its Quebec copper-gold economics, Eldorado poured first concentrate at Skouries, and Rio Tinto cleared a landmark Aboriginal consent for Winu — a day when development-stage juniors stole the spotlight from the majors.September 10, 2026
Mining Press Roundup: Copper's Record Rally Hits a China-Sized Pothole as Ivanhoe and Marimaca Keep Drilling BiggerCopper stalls just below record highs as China's imports slump even as mine supply tightens, while Troilus triples its project value, Ivanhoe grows its DRC discovery 30%, and Eldorado ships first concentrate from Skouries.September 9, 2026
Shopify Acquires Tailwind Labs, CSS MakerShopify has acquired Tailwind Labs, bringing the world's most-installed CSS framework in-house nine months after AI tools gutted its revenue.September 9, 2026
Showing the latest 50 of 949 articles. See every article in the archive.