After
Charif Souki, the founder and former CEO of large natural gas company
Cheniere Energy, was fired from the company after a takeover by billionaire investor
Carl Icahn, he founded Tellurian in 2016 with Martin Houston, the former COO of
BG Group. The board of Cheniere had expelled Souki over, in part, his plans to more ambitiously expand the company, plans that he brought to Tellurian, telling the
Financial Times upon launch that he aimed to undercut its rivals, including Cheniere, by 15 to 20 percent. The company hired several former Cheniere executives, including Meg Gentle, Cheniere's former executive vice president of marketing. On August 2, 2016, Tellurian entered into a merger agreement with petroleum company Magellan; other early investors included the French oil and gas company Total, which purchased a 23 percent stake in the company for $207 million in December 2016. After one year in operation, Tellurian went public (NASDAQ: TELL). In 2017, Tellurian bought $85 million in shale assets in Louisiana and, in doing so, became the first United States developer to produce its own fuel for its export terminal. Tellurian's major planned project was a
liquefied natural gas production project, Driftwood LNG, on the west bank of the Calcasieu River, south of Lake Charles, Louisiana. According to the company, Driftwood was projected to produce 27,600,000 tonnes of liquified natural gas per year for export. Total, in July 2019, agreed to buy 2.5m tonnes of liquefied natural gas from Driftwood. The plant, projected to cost $30 billion (on a FFP contract from
Bechtel), was backed by Total as well as Vitol and India's Petronet. However, Tellurian ran into trouble toward the end of the decade due to delays in Driftwood's construction, dropping fuel prices, ongoing tensions between the United States and China, and the
COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated dropping prices and greatly affected China, South Korea and Japan, three of the world's largest importers of
liquefied natural gas. The company, faced with falling shares, fired 40 percent of staff in 2020. In July 2024, Australian petroleum exploration and production company,
Woodside Energy, agreed to acquire Tellurian for a total
enterprise value of $1.2 billion. The acquisition was completed that October and renamed the Driftwood LNG development project as Woodside Louisiana LNG. == References ==