Please notice I said “for 2017.” While we are nibbling at this sector now, unlike most prognosticators, I believe we are likely to see one more downswing this year. If I’m wrong, we still own a little.

Right now, there is still a smidge too much supply, with more continuing to come on-stream, and too little demand, globally or in the US. But as long as cartels and governments are ineffective or distracted, Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is at play in the gas and oil sector just as it is everywhere else. The euphoria over the head-fake supply constraint deal reached in Algiers? It will be forgotten as each and every OPEC member cheats on their allotment. So in the short term, I see supply as greater than demand, and that is why I am only nibbling at the stocks of companies that make their living from selling gas and oil.

But over time? Again, the equation is remarkably simple, as is the case for owning gas and oil companies and their suppliers and contractors: more bodies on earth = more motor scooters, more cars, more factories, and more travel = greater demand. Greater… than the supply.

I also see bargains developing more fully as the “reserve replacement” numbers are released shortly after year end. The SEC dictates that the average of the previous year’s month-end prices be used when a company defines its “proven reserves.” And proven reserves only count those reserves that are economically retrievable at that snapshot in time. This makes sense. Claiming a trillion barrels of oil is meaningless if it would cost $10,000 a barrel to get them out of the ground. As investors see what seems to be decreasing proven reserves, I think they will panic and drive quality gas and oil firms down one more time. For instance, seeing a chart like this one would make most people believe Exxon (NYSE:XOM) is depleting its reserves. Not so – it’s merely showing that proven reserves (those that are economical at today’s prices) have declined for now from over 100% to just under 70%. At a higher price, they will increase again:

All along, the physical resource is still there – and the cost of getting it out of the ground is coming down every year as explorers, producers, drillers, suppliers and refiners use new technologies to reduce extraction and distribution costs. To me, these reserves are like money in the bank that is tied up for some short-term reason. Better technologies will allow them to be freed up once again. The gas and oil companies that lazy journalists claim “…are depleting their reserves! They don’t really have the reserves they said they did!” will prove these Chicken Littles wrong. The gas and oil firms can’t claim it in their current reporting since, at today’s prices, it isn’t economically viable. But it’s still there. And more valuable as prices begin to stabilize based on new demand.

As an annual percentage increase, of course, demand is growing less quickly than it did before 2007-2008. But it is still growing. And it is increasing ever more quickly in India, the fastest-growing country in the world (where, unlike China, we can likely trust their growth numbers!), as well as in many other emerging markets. Want to grow your nation? You’ll need gas and oil. For transportation. For infrastructure products. For plastics. For chemicals. For heating and air-conditioning. As the world grows, gas and oil demand grow.

Energy consultant Wood McKenzie recently concluded that big elephant hunts are being replaced by what just happens to be our favorite approach: more gas than oil, more unconventional extraction like oil sands, advances in horizontal fracturing technologies and, my favorite of all since we do the hard research on up-and-coming gas and oil firms, via acquisitions. That’s why I’m looking to buy in what I think will be a valley of opportunity in coming weeks and months. Alternatives may someday rule, but today the electric vehicles that are all the rage still run on lithium or electricity. Lithium batteries, like almost every product on earth, take energy to produce. Electricity takes, mostly, gas, coal or oil to produce.

It is a good thing that people care about the flora and fauna that inhabit this earth as we strive to find cleaner sources of energy. But there are as yet no ideal solutions; only intelligent discourse. That is why I see natural gas, the cleanest of all non-renewables, as the most obvious short-to-intermediate term investment choice.