3 Energy Stocks to Buy With $500 and Hold Forever
ExxonMobil combines low-cost oil production with growing investments in carbon capture, lithium, and clean tech.
Enbridge offers a 6% dividend yield, a 30-year dividend streak, and new projects like a solar deal with Meta Platforms.
NextEra has a high valuation, but its cash flow and growth make it a durable energy stock.
10 stocks we like better than ExxonMobil ›
Old-school energy sources aren't going anywhere. Even as the world transitions to cleaner power, oil and gas (and the infrastructure behind them) remain integral to the global economy.
Add in rising electricity demand from AI and data centers, and you have a sector where both old-school titans and new-age renewables can thrive.
Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More »
If you have $500 and want to build a long-term, diversified position in energy, the goal is pretty simple: Find companies with strong balance sheets, steady dividends, and exposure to both sides of the energy transition. The following three energy stocks fit that bill precisely.
1. ExxonMobil: old-school energy with new ambitions
ExxonMobil(NYSE: XOM) is a titan of traditional energy. With operations spanning oil fields, gas stations, and refineries, the oil stock is built to weather just about any price cycle.
It's a fossil fuel giant, but Exxon isn't acting like a dinosaur. In December 2024, the company unveiled a bold 2030 plan to generate $20 billion in new earnings and $30 billion in added cash flow, all while deploying $140 billion to major projects and boosting shareholder returns.
About $30 billion of that is earmarked for carbon capture, hydrogen, and lithium developments. That's not a plan to pivot away from oil per se, but it is one to stay relevant no matter where energy goes next.
More to the present, Exxon has a fortress of a balance sheet, with $18.5 billion in cash at the end of the first quarter and an industry-leading debt-to-capital ratio of about 12%. As the chart below shows, both of these put Exxon in a favorable position in respect to its biggest competitor, Chevron.
And perhaps most important of all, Exxon pays investors to wait. The company has raised its dividend for 42 consecutive years, with a current yield near 3.5% and plenty of free cash flow to support future increases. Add in that strong balance sheet, ongoing share buybacks, and one of the lowest break-even oil prices in the industry, and you have a cash machine with staying power.
2. Enbridge: a dividend pipeline that's going solar
Enbridge(NYSE: ENB) is Canada's energy highway. It transports about 30% of North America's crude oil and 20% of the U.S. natural gas supply. Fun fact: Its oil pipeline network stretches more than 18,000 miles, long enough to wrap around three-quarters of the Equator.
With a dividend north of 6% and three decades of consecutive hikes, Enbridge has become a go-to for income investors. What really sets it apart, however, is how it is building a dual engine for growth. The company is investing billions annually not just into pipeline expansions, but also offshore, wind, solar, and renewable natural gas.
The strategy is already in motion. Enbridge recently broke ground on Clear Fork, a 600-megawatt solar project near San Antonio, Texas, backed by a long-term power purchase agreement with Meta Platforms. The $900 million facility is expected to come on line in 2027 and start adding cash flow and earnings right away. It's a clear sign that the company isn't just moving energy anymore but helping to build infrastructure that will power tech giants and data centers.
3. NextEra Energy: the clean energy leader
NextEra Energy(NYSE: NEE), the lone renewables stock on this list, brings something the other two can't: long-term growth without the fossil fuel baggage. It's the world's largest producer of wind and solar power, and it runs Florida Power & Light, the biggest regulated utility in the country.
In the second quarter, NextEra added 3.2 gigawatts of new clean-energy projects, lifting its total backlog to 30 gigawatts, roughly the size of 30 nuclear reactors. That pipeline gives the company visibility into future earnings, which it expects to grow 6% to 8% annually through 2027.
It's also targeting 10% dividend growth through at least 2026, building on 29 straight years of increases . Today's 3% yield may not scream high income, but it's backed by strong free cash flow and one of the safest payout ratios in the industry.
One caveat is that the company trades at a premium: about 20 times forward earnings. But with projected earnings per share (EPS) of $3.45 to $3.70 this year and unmatched leadership in the renewables race, that premium isn't empty air. For investors looking to own a piece of the clean energy sector, NextEra Energy seems about as "forever" as it gets.
Powering your portfolio for the long haul
With Exxon's oil empire, Enbridge's pipelines, and NextEra's clean energy runway, investors have options that span the full energy spectrum. Each company brings something different to the table, but all three are built to endure. Whether you're looking for dividends or stability, these three offer a balanced way to invest in the future of energy.
Should you invest $1,000 in ExxonMobil right now?
Before you buy stock in ExxonMobil, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and ExxonMobil wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $624,823!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,064,820!*
Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,019% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 178% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.
See the 10 stocks »
*Stock Advisor returns as of July 29, 2025
Steven Porrello has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Chevron, Enbridge, Meta Platforms, and NextEra Energy. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Globe and Mail
20 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
1 Reason to Buy Solana (SOL)
Key Points Solana hasn't kept up with the rest of the crypto market. However, the lightning-fast blockchain is seeing significant growth in tokenized RWAs. 10 stocks we like better than Solana › Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) has recently disappointed investors. It's down 1% over the last year (as of July 30), which looks particularly poor considering that crypto has been in a bull market. In fact, out of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, Solana has performed the worst over the last year. But circumstances can change quickly in the crypto market, and Solana has a new use case that could help it rebound. Solana is a hotspot for tokenization This year, Solana has seen rapid growth in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). These are crypto tokens on a blockchain that represent a physical asset or a financial instrument. For example, you can buy tokenized equities on Solana that are equivalent to stock shares. The selection of equities is a lot smaller than what you'd find in your brokerage account, at least for the time being. But you can invest in tokenized versions of dozens of companies, including Tesla, Palantir Technologies, and Nvidia. The number of RWA holders on Solana has increased by 1,281% this year to nearly 63,000. Total RWA value has increased by 176% to $479 million, and Solana could be on the cusp of greater growth in this area. BioSig Technologies recently announced it will invest as much as $1.1 billion in physical gold bullion for its treasury. It also plans to issue gold-backed crypto tokens using Solana. This could potentially triple Solana's RWA value and attract more users to its blockchain. The early stages of tokenized RWAs RWAs have just started taking off, but they have the potential to drastically increase the value locked onto blockchain ecosystems. Solana's speed and ultra-cheap transactions make it well suited for RWA applications. Despite Solana's lackluster performance over the last year, it's still an exciting cryptocurrency investment that may be poised for a big move. Should you invest $1,000 in Solana right now? Before you buy stock in Solana, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Solana wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $624,823!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,064,820!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,019% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 178% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 29, 2025
CTV News
41 minutes ago
- CTV News
Companies taking concrete steps toward capturing revenues from carbon dioxide
A CarbiCrete curing chamber in which CO2 is permanently mineralized into concrete during the curing process is seen in this undated handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout — CarbiCrete (Mandatory Credit) It can be used to make fuel, fertilizer, building material and even soap, but can carbon dioxide be a money maker, too? Carbon capture has long been a focus of emissions reduction efforts in Canada. It involves collecting the climate-warming gas from industrial sites and preventing it from entering the atmosphere, most often by stowing it away permanently underground. Less common has been capturing CO2 and making it into something useful. 'Carbon utilization does not have a big history. It's relatively nascent,' said Apoorv Sinha, chief executive of Carbon Upcycling. The Calgary-based company combines industrial waste products with carbon dioxide to make a cement-like product that can be used in concrete foundations and sidewalks. 'Canada actually punches well above its weight in carbon-to-value across the building material sector, even in carbon chemicals.' Storing carbon has been the automatic go-to as industry has a wealth of experience doing it at a large scale, said David Sanguinetti, interim CEO at cleantech incubator Foresight Canada. While carbon utilization has the benefit of generating direct revenues from usable products, the economics are uncertain in a lot of cases, he said. 'It's either niche or not great right now with the current state of technology,' he said. 'If you don't have a price on carbon, then a lot of the current concepts that are out there, which are technically feasible — people have done it in the lab, they've proven it out — there isn't an economic driver to make it happen.' The Canadian Gas Association commissioned a report from Foresight Canada last year into the carbon utilization market, which concluded that storing carbon from large industrial emitters is likely to beat out using it — at least for the time being. Foresight sees southwestern Ontario being a good spot for carbon utilization to take root as there are clusters of large emitters and innovation hubs, but little in the way of infrastructure for underground storage like Alberta has. CO2 utilization falls into two categories — direct use or conversion. Direct use includes the long-standing practice of injecting the gas into mature oilfields to draw more barrels to the surface. With conversion, the chemical makeup of the gas is altered to make products like aviation fuel and fertilizer. At a smaller scale, Calgary-based CleanO2 captures the gas from building heating systems and turns it into pearl ash used in its hand soap, shampoo and other products. One of the more promising applications has been using the gas in building materials so it's trapped permanently. Last week, Carbon Upcycling held a groundbreaking ceremony at the Ash Grove cement plant in Mississauga, Ont., where work on a commercial demonstration project is underway. Production is to begin next spring. CarbiCrete, based in Montreal, has developed technology for greener precast masonry and hardscapes — think concrete blocks, retaining walls and paving stones that can be sent to a construction site, not the ready-mix stuff churning in a truck's drum. Concrete is traditionally made up of cement, aggregate like rocks or gravel, and water. 'It's the most abundant manmade substance on the planet,' said Yuri Mytko, CarbiCrete's chief marketing officer. 'But cement has traditionally been the key ingredient and cement is hugely problematic in that it accounts for about eight per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.' CarbiCrete uses steelmaking slag instead of cement, and cures it in a chamber with CO2 instead of applying heat and steam. 'You're left with a concrete product that has the same properties as cement-based concrete, except with none of the emissions associated with it and also with carbon having been permanently mineralized and removed from the atmosphere,' said Mytko. CarbiCrete licenses its technology to concrete product makers and helps them retrofit their plants. Dave Sawyer, principal economist at the Canadian Climate Institute said utilization can work by helping companies generate credits to sell, but it's a relatively small piece of the emissions-reduction picture. Carbon capture, utilization and storage in general has been painted by business and industry as 'one big silver bullet technology,' he said, but there are other emissions-busting approaches that should be getting more attention. For example, sodium ion batteries may be just as technically feasible as carbon capture, utilization and storage — and maybe cheaper. 'But we just keep going to this big lumpy thing ... that is really cost prohibitive.' Sinha said carbon utilization gets a fraction of the support and resources of traditional storage projects, whose technology has been around for decades. 'What needs to happen is more support and a larger focus towards deploying these technologies quickly and testing them out. Because right now, just the amount of data — how to build these facilities, how to operate them — very little of it exists.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 3, 2025. Lauren Krugel, The Canadian Press
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
How Should Investors View Stablecoins: As a Utility or a Speculative Asset?
Key Points Stablecoins exist to move fiat currency value onto blockchains. They shouldn't ever grow much in value. Not all of these assets are equally safe or equally easy to use. 10 stocks we like better than Tether › Cash has always been the grease of capitalism, shuffling quietly from buyer to seller so the real business can get done. In crypto, something still has to play that crucial but unglamorous role, and that something is the stablecoin. Without a trustworthy on-chain dollar to use as a medium of exchange, every trade would involve swapping in and out of volatile tokens that often experience 10% moves in a day. Yet the headlines that push stablecoins into the spotlight tend to trumpet new regulations, billion-dollar market caps, fresh exchange listings, and -- occasionally -- dramatic deviation from their intended fixed value (de-pegging) that leaves destruction in its wake. That can make them look like the next hot trade rather than the digital equivalent of the crumpled bills in a supermarket till. To decide whether they belong in your portfolio at all, it pays to separate their utilitarian purpose from their real but frequently misunderstood risks. When you hear about stablecoins, you're hearing about cash At the simplest level, a stablecoin is a crypto token designed to track the price of a target fiat currency, -- usually the U.S. dollar -- so that people can send, store, and settle value on-chain without worrying about minute-by-minute price swings. USDC (CRYPTO: USDC) is the poster child for this model, and the second largest of all stablecoins. Every token is said to be backed 1-for-1 by cash and short-term U.S. Treasury bills held by the issuer Circle, with independent attestations posted monthly. Meanwhile, Circle's own valuation ballooned to roughly $60 billion as USDC's circulating supply hit $61.3 billion in June -- though the company now has a market cap of $46.2 billion, whereas its coin's value now is about $64 billion. Tether's stablecoin, USDT (CRYPTO: USDT) -- the sector's biggest stablecoin with a market cap of $164 billion -- publishes daily snapshots that claim its reserves exceed liabilities, though critics note that the level of detail in its disclosures varies. And, in late 2024, Ripple USD (CRYPTO: RLUSD) entered the fray, pitched by Ripple Labs as an institutional investor-friendly alternative that lives on XRP 's chain but is quickly finding retail takers, too. Viewed through that lens, holding a stablecoin is less an investment than a convenience fee. You trade the rock-bottom risk of a bank deposit for the same amount of purchasing power embedded on 24/7 blockchain rails and near-instant transaction settlements. If your goal is long-term capital appreciation, then assets like other cryptocurrencies or equities or even fairly conservative bonds will almost certainly do incalculably more heavy lifting. But if you routinely move funds between exchanges, stake in yield pools, or settle invoices with global partners, the ability to snap digital dollars across chains is invaluable. These risks could turn utility into liability Stablecoins are, at this point of their maturity as an asset, riskier than holding the equivalent amount of cash. For stablecoins, stability hinges on three pressure points that every investor should keep in mind. First, there's asset issuer quality. Fully collateralized coins can break their peg if the issuer's reserves prove shakier than advertised or if they are frozen by regulators. If you're going to hold significant value in a stablecoin, read the attestation reports and audits, not the marketing copy. And check the price history for any evidence of past de-pegging. Second, there are chain and bridge risks to consider. In the same vein, there are also interoperability risks or, more colloquially, the risk that the stablecoin you own is not compatible with the blockchain that you want to do business on. As an example, a USDT stored on Ethereum is not the same asset as a USDT bridged to Solana, and moving between chains relies on third-party bridges that have been prime hacker targets, and which also tend to incur fees. Developers are racing to build native cross-chain standards, but for now, every hop between chains introduces another potential point of failure. To be clear, this issue is common to many types of cryptocurrencies, but it's important to identify it specifically in the context of stablecoins because of the (incorrect) assumptions that investors often have about them due to their interchangeability with cash. Third, not all pegs rely on holding old-fashioned cash -- much to the detriment of their holders. Algorithmic models in the past have attempted to hold parity through burn -and- mint mechanics, which reduce or add coins to the supply to maintain the $1 equilibrium point. But during times of market turmoil, rapid withdrawals can lead to oversupply and breaking the peg. Investors who mistake such structures for a boring digital dollar end up learning the hard way that complexity and leverage can masquerade as stability right up until they don't. So where does that leave the long-term investor? Treat stablecoins as working capital, not high-yield savings. It's not a bad idea to diversify across at least two issuers, and favor tokens that publish frequent, detailed reserve attestations. If you operate on multiple chains, consider maintaining the native version of a coin on each chain rather than relying on bridges. Lastly, remember that new jurisdictions, from the U.S. Congress to Hong Kong's monetary authority, are rolling out licensing regimes that may well reshuffle the leaderboard of the top or best stablecoins in short order. Should you invest $1,000 in Tether right now? Before you buy stock in Tether, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Tether wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $624,823!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,064,820!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,019% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 178% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 29, 2025
