The Sunday Read: ‘How One Restaurateur Transformed America’s Energy Industry’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

It was a long-shot bet on liquid natural gas, but it paid off handsomely — and turned the United States into a leading fossil-fuel exporter. The journalist Jake Bittle delves into the storied career of Charif Souki, the Lebanese American entrepreneur whose aptitude for risk changed the course of the American energy business. The article outlines how Mr. Souki rose from being a Los Angeles restaurant owner to becoming the co-founder and chief executive of Cheniere Energy, an oil and gas company that specialized in liquefied natural gas, and provides an insight into his thought process: “As Souki sees it,” Mr. Bittle writes, “the need to provide the world with energy in the short term outweighs the long-term demand of acting on carbon emissions.” In a time of acute climate anxiety, Mr. Souki’s rationale could strike some as outdated, even brazen. The world may be facing energy and climate crises, Mr. Souki told The New York Times, “but one is going to happen this month, and the other one is going to happen in 40 years.” “If you tell somebody, ‘You are going to run out of electricity this month,’ and then you talk to the same person about what’s going to happen in 40 years,” he said, “they will tell you, ‘What do I care about 40 years from now?’”

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0:00.0	Earlier this year, two or three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, I was driving through
0:10.8	Sabine Pass, which is a fishing community in Port Arthur, Texas, right by the Louisiana
0:16.9	border.
0:18.7	You come down on this highway and over a bridge that straddles the two states, and your
0:23.2	whole field of view is suddenly dominated by a colossal liquid natural gas facility that
0:29.1	seems to stretch all the way across the horizon.
0:32.6	There are six gigantic steel structures, where gas is piped through at incredibly high
0:37.2	speeds on its way to becoming liquid.
0:39.9	And there's a tower belching flames into the air that you can see from miles away.
0:46.1	There are massive storage tanks, each of which could hold a 747 with room to spare.
0:52.8	And then there's the noise.
0:54.0	It's like the sound of a jet engine, just hanging in the air and a loud continuous dim.
1:01.3	This whole complex was a liquefaction terminal for the natural gas company, Sheneer.
1:06.7	I had come all the way here to the edge of the world to report on its founder, an energy
1:11.4	baron named Shereef Suki.
1:14.2	Suki, a former restaurant tour and entrepreneur originally from Lebanon, is one of the people
1:19.6	most responsible for shepherding the United States from a position of energy weakness to
1:25.4	being the linchpin of a global energy transition.
1:31.2	My name is Jake Biddle.
1:32.5	I write about climate change and energy, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times
1:36.7	magazine.
1:38.7	Almost every major economy in the world needs natural gas to function.
	...

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