Q&A: How Ethan Bellamy Found His Way Back to Oil and Gas

Hart Energy: You’ve gone through some career introspection recently. Tell us about it.

Bellamy: The further you go in your career, the more specialized you become. You find yourself at these decision points where either you double down on what you already know and try to be even better at it, or you take a turn and try to go apply your skills elsewhere. The Venn diagram of my skill set has been really two things: the securities markets in institutional equities and midstream energy.

We’ve seen the active asset management business take a huge hit due to the influx of passive funds and relatively poor value add from active managers, albeit with some notable exceptions. We’ve seen some pressure on oil- and gas-dedicated energy capital because of ESG concerns, but mostly because of the resource oversupply and resulting pressure on hydrocarbon prices. I thought seriously about, hey, should I just go do something else in financial services? And while I was having that sort of existential thought, my prior firm, like many firms, just decided to get out of the energy business, which I view as kind of selling at the bottom. So, did I want to move on, or sell at the bottom myself?

Rob Wilson and Justin Carlson at East Daley really changed my mind. East Daley takes research in midstream to the level that, frankly, I didn’t really understand was possible. We model everything from the ground up, using pipeline receipt points, contract specifications, rig allocations by producer and every other available scrap of data to model a granular perspective on the midstream space.