Wealth
Oil Tycoon’s Well-Timed IPO Boosts Fortune by $1.4 Billion
- George Kaiser’s Excelerate Energy begins trading on the NYSE
- It controls 20% of the world’s fleet of specialized LNG ships
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April 13, 2022, 9:15 AM EDTUpdated onApril 13, 2022, 12:17 PM EDT
George Kaiser, whose parents fled Nazi Germany for the Oklahoma oil patch, was already a billionaire before Russia invaded Ukraine and threw the global energy market into turmoil.
Still, a well-timed initial public offering of his
Excelerate Energy Inc.has added $1.4 billion to his fortune and boosted his net worth to $9.2 billion, according to the
Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Shares of The Woodlands, Texas-based Excelerate were trading at $27.21 at 12:04 p.m. in New York, up 13% from their offering price and valuing the liquefied natural gas company at $2.9 billion.
Excelerate CEO Steven Kobos --
“We’ve been focused on providing energy to markets for a long time,” Chief Executive Officer Steven Kobos said Wednesday in an interview. “We feel we’re at a great point in time after nearly 20 years.”
The Biden administration last month said it
planned to export 15 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe this year to help countries slash Russian imports, but getting the fuel across the Atlantic Ocean is no small feat.
It’s a complex process that requires cooling the gas to about -260 degrees Fahrenheit (-162 degrees Celsius), which liquefies it, then loading it onto specialized ships. Once at its destination, the cargo is warmed and converted back into gas.
Excelerate, which Kaiser founded in 2003,
controls a fifth of the world’s fleet of 46 floating storage and re-gasification units, or FSRUs, which can handle the conversion while anchored offshore. The vessels are either built-to-order or converted from older LNG tankers, and can be installed in a matter of months, while onshore import terminals require additional infrastructure and take years to build.
“One of our vessels is delivering four-and-a-half-million tons through a single FSRU,” Kobos said. “That’s re-gasifying more than 1% of total current LNG production.”
Several European nations are already
making plans to acquire such vessels. Last week, Finland and Estonia
announced they would be jointly renting an FSRU to supply the Baltic countries with gas.
Last year, Excelerate generated $41 million of income on sales of $888.6 million. About half of that revenue came from its FSRU and terminal services businesses, with the remainder from buying and re-selling gas.
Excelerate is Kaiser’s second major energy holding. His biggest asset is
Kaiser-Francis Oil, a Tulsa-based independent oil and gas exploration company founded by his father. The younger Kaiser took over the business in 1969 after earning an undergraduate degree and an MBA from
Harvard University.
The foundation is active in the Tulsa area and reported $3.7 billion in net assets at the end of 2019. While Kaiser isn’t an Excelerate officer, he can appoint three of six directors and holds certain other rights through a shareholder agreement with the firm. In the event of Kaiser’s death, those rights will transfer to his foundation for five years.
