Tellurian Inc. is an American natural gas company headquartered in

Houston, Texas Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...

. It was founded in 2016 by Charif Souki and Martin Houston. The company was acquired by

Woodside Energy Woodside Energy Group Ltd (formerly Woodside Petroleum Ltd) is an Australian petroleum exploration and production company. Woodside is the operator of oil and gas production in Australia and also Australia's largest independent dedicated oil a ...

in 2024.

History

After Charif Souki, the founder and former CEO of large natural gas company

Cheniere Energy Cheniere Energy, Inc. is an American liquefied natural gas (LNG) company headquartered in Houston, Texas. In February 2016 it became the first American company to export liquefied natural gas. Cheniere Energy is the largest exporter of LNG in t ...

, was fired from the company after a takeover by billionaire investor

Carl Icahn Carl Celian Icahn (; born February 16, 1936) is an American businessman and investor. He is the founder and controlling shareholder of Icahn Enterprises, a public company and diversified conglomerate holding company based in Sunny Isles Beach, ...

, 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 The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Jap ...

'' 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 Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is natural gas (predominantly methane, CH4, with some mixture of ethane, C2H6) that has been cooled to liquid form for ease and safety of non-pressurized storage or transport. It takes up about 1/600th the volume o ...

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 Bechtel Corporation () is an American engineering, procurement, construction, and project management company founded in San Francisco, California in 1898, and headquartered in Reston, Virginia in the Washington metropolitan area. , the '' E ...

), 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 The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, which exacerbated dropping prices and greatly affected China, South Korea and Japan, three of the world's largest importers of

. The company, faced with falling shares, fired 40 percent of staff in 2020. Tellurian's animosity with Icahn and Cheniere also resulted in a lawsuit. The suit, described by Bloomberg News as the "trial of the year," was prompted by $46 million in loans Souki made to Houston's Parallax Enterprises during his time as Cheniere CEO. Cheniere alleged in the suit that Souki used those loans to found Tellurian, and also alleged that he stole the early plans for Driftwood. Tellurian argued that the loan was void, that Driftwood was a different, larger project despite sharing land with the early plans, and that Cheniere had since breached its contract with Parallax by abruptly pulling the funds. The lawsuit, which lasted for years driven by the ongoing feud, was dismissed in 2020, the year it was set to go to court. In July 2024, Australian petroleum exploration and production company,

, 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

External links

* {{Finance links historical , name = Tellurian Inc. , symbol = TELL , sec_cik = TELL , yahoo = TELL , google = TELL 2016 establishments in Texas Companies based in Houston Natural gas companies of the United States Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Companies formerly listed on NYSE American 2024 mergers and acquisitions Woodside Energy