Chris Helman

1 week ago | forbes.com | Christopher Helman |Chris Helman

Michigan is sitting on a motherlode of potash and Ted Pagano is using $1.3 billion in government funds to mine it and grab market share away from Canada and Russia. The eureka moment came in 2012, when professor emeritus William Harrison of the University of Western Michigan invited Ted Pagano, then a 35-year-old freelance geologist, to his 27,000-square-foot geological repository in Kalamazoo.

1 week ago | forbes.com | Christopher Helman |Chris Helman

Goldman Sachs sees gold as a far better hedge against a collapsing dollar than bitcoin. Over the past few decades, when U.S. interest rates rose, investors would tend to sell gold and buy U.S. Treasuries, seeking higher yields. But that long term relationship broke down in February 2022, when western financial authorities moved to freeze Russia's central bank assets upon President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This was a wake up call, says Lina Thomas, commodity strategist at Goldman Sachs.

2 weeks ago | forbes.com | Christopher Helman |Chris Helman

Like a 180-degree shift in the winds, the Department of Interior on Monday reversed its order from April for Norwegian energy giant Equinor to halt work on the $5 billion Empire Wind project. The venture – which will feature dozens of turbines dotting 80,000 acres of Atlantic Ocean 15 miles southeast off Long Island, New York – had been in limbo for weeks, and was costing Equinor $50 million a week to keep 10 ships floating on site. Now they can get back to work.

1 month ago | forbes.com | Christopher Helman |Chris Helman

Occidental Petroleum’s conventional oilfields in the Permian basin of west Texas have been producing for decades. And although output has slowed, there remains 2 billion barrels of oil still trapped thousands of feet below the surface. Engineers have figured out several methods over the years to scour out stubborn oil from nooks and crannies in the reservoir rock (think of a sponge but with much tighter pore spaces).

1 month ago | forbes.com | Christopher Helman |Chris Helman

Outside of China, the most influential investor in the world of rare earth elements has to be Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman. Rare earths may be just a small part of her $30 billion mining fortune, but Rinehart, through family holding company Hancock Prospecting, has acquired big stakes in leading non-Chinese rare earths companies.