The Seven Petro-Wolves: Foreword by Mr. Nicolas Sarkis

By Tahereh Amirzadeh

The rapid flyover of the hydrocarbon history remains uncomplete if it overlooks and doesn't take into consideration the human aspect, i.e. the crucial role played and the skills of some exceptional pioneers who started from nothing or with few means and succeeded in opening new ways and developing some major activities of the today's world oil and gas industries. The captivating itinerary of some of these pioneers, that one can call adventurers or visionaries is very well described, with many unknown and pleasant anecdotes, in the new book of Tahereh Amirzadeh under the title "The Seven Petro-Wolves".The first of these wolves is John D. Rockefeller who was the first and real pioneer of the oil industry and more specifically the creator and father of what we call today multinational or international oil companies (IOCs). His business model was mainly based on economies of scale and control of the supply chain from A to Z and was the first example of vertical integration which was later adopted by other large oil and gas companies as well as in other large businesses.More recently, other so-called "oil wolves" comprise the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former member of the USSR's Communist Party who has seized the occasion of the Perestroika and economic liberalization to create in 1987 with other partners the first private bank in the ex-USSR and to acquire later on assets developed formerly by the State. The biggest was Russia's second largest oil company, Yukos, purchased at a cost of no more than 309 million dollars. Two years later Yukos was listed on the stock market with a value of ... 9 billion dollars, and Khodorkovsky's worth increased to an estimated 15 billion.So the "business model" of this curious "wolf" can very simply be described as the way to earn rapidly billions of dollars with a minimum of work, but with good political connections.Last but not least a striking modern representative of the "oil wolves" is Charif Souki, a Lebanese who came to the USA as a student and stayed there because the civil war in Lebanon. With no diploma, no capital and no connection whatsoever with oil ang gas, he decided to become an entrepreneur, first as an investment banker and later on in oil and gas exploration and finally as a key actor in the completely unexpected boom of the shale gas in the United States over the last 10-20 years. His major challenge and achievement was the construction of a large terminal which was initially intended to import and regasify liquefied natural gas (LNG) to be imported from Algeria and other gas exporting countries. Souki's company Cheniere Energy had raised billions of dollars to fund this project when the gas market was suddenly turned upside down by the shale revolution, starting in 2009-2010, with a national production booming at a rate nobody could foresee. The consequence was that instead of being a country needing to import natural gas, the USA became not only self-sufficient but in a position to export more and more huge volume of shale oil and gas. A reversal which was a big blow to Souki's dream and several billion importing terminal, the collapse of Cheniere stocks and the prospect of bankruptcy. Facing this misfortune, the "wolf" decided to take advantage of this challenge by deciding to raise new funds in order to transform the import terminal scheme into an export shale gas terminal.So the business model of Charif Souki could be summarized in few words: Anticipate and act with determination whatever the difficulties and challenges.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08YNXJGVX
• ISBN13: 9798719943817
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"