Souki still wasn’t when I met him in early February at Tellurian’s downtown Houston office. The company has a small space in a building owned by the oil giant TotalEnergies, and from the top-floor conference room Souki and I could look out and see the distant expanse of the Texas City oil complex, a jumble of storage tanks and refineries. spitting bright orange flames. Despite all the hurdles Tellurian faced, Souki had an unflappable demeanor and spoke with the kind of blasé confidence one would expect from a man accustomed to raising billions of dollars for long-term projects. He wore one of his signature double-breasted suits, along with a pink tie, and as he talked, he sometimes took a retractable ballpoint pen from his jacket and fiddled with the clicker.
I wondered why Souki was so determined to get back into the LNG business. After all, he had already made a fortune and the industry he started was maturing. Tellurian was several years and billions of dollars away from taking advantage of it again. Why didn’t he just stay home in Aspen?
“The world is crying out for natural gas,” he said, “and I would like to be able to supply natural gas as soon as possible.” There was already an energy shortage in Europe over the winter, due to a rapid recovery from the pandemic, and people in Britain were worried about paying their gas bills – how could he not want to provide them with more fuel? In addition, he said, “the emerging countries will add two billion people, and their standard of living is constantly improving. They won’t say, ‘I don’t want to live like you.’”
As Souki sees it, the need to provide the world with energy in the short term outweighs the long-term demand to intervene in CO2 emissions. The world may be facing energy and climate crises, he said, “but one is going to happen this month and the other in 40 years.” He added: “If you tell someone, ‘You’re out of electricity this month,’ and you talk to the same person about what’s going to happen 40 years from now, they’ll tell you, ‘What do I care in 40 years? ‘”
Two weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. The booming US LNG industry hastened to fill the gap left by Russian gas and shifted its focus from Asia to Europe. Cargos that had already left US export facilities bound for Japan or China changed course and headed for France and the Netherlands, fetching multiples of the price they had been paid a few days earlier. A few weeks after the invasion began, the United States and the European Commission announced a long-term deal to help Europe rid itself of Russian gas, with US producers pledging to supply at least a third of what Russia had once supplied to the continent. Bulgaria, Germany and Greece rushed to build new import terminals so they could accept US gas before the winter, as Russia cut off gas supplies to one country after another; eventually Germany moved to old coal-fired power stations. Just a few months earlier, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, the same European governments had reaffirmed their intention to give up fossil fuels, but now they had to suspend those ambitions.
I met Souki again in April in New York, in the downtown offices of a media strategy firm. Souki took advantage of the chaos in the energy markets to once again make his moral case for shipping fracked gas around the world: He stopped in New York to talk to potential investors and develop a new media strategy for Tellurian before moving to Washington. to meet policy makers and legislators. We sat together at a conference table in the lobby.