CHARIF SOUKI

Souki was born in Beirut in 1952 and came to the US for university. His first major business venture had nothing to do with energy — he ran Muse, a well-regarded restaurant in Beverly Hills during the 1990s.

He founded Cheniere Energy in 1996, initially as a company to build LNG import terminals. The thinking was simple: the US was running low on natural gas.

Import it.

Then the shale revolution happened. Domestic natural gas flooded the market.

Souki pivoted — dramatically. Instead of importing LNG, Cheniere would export it.

This was a contrarian call of the first order. The Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana had already been partially built for imports.

Souki repurposed it for exports and applied for the first LNG export license from the US government.

The approvals took years. The capital raises were brutal.

Short-sellers circled. Critics said it would never happen.

The first LNG cargo from Sabine Pass shipped in February 2016 — a genuinely historic moment. It was the first LNG export from the continental US in modern history.

Chevron, Shell, and BG Group signed long-term purchase agreements. The stock ripped.

Cheniere's market cap hit $35 billion. Then activist investor Carl Icahn stepped in, criticizing Souki's $142 million compensation package.

In December 2015 Souki was effectively forced out. He left just as the terminal he built started making money.

He founded Tellurian Inc. in 2016 with a plan to build the Driftwood LNG terminal in Louisiana.

But financing a second mega-project proved much harder the second time. Souki resigned as Executive Chairman in 2023 after Driftwood failed to secure final investment decisions.

Cheniere Energy is the main chapter. Souki co-founded it in 1996 and built it from a blank-sheet startup into the operator of the Sabine Pass LNG terminal — the first liquefied natural gas export facility in the continental US.

The company now operates two major LNG export terminals and is one of the largest LNG exporters in the world.

After being pushed out of Cheniere in 2015, Souki founded Tellurian Inc. with former Cheniere colleague Martin Houston.

The plan was to build the Driftwood LNG terminal and fund it with a novel financing model that gave suppliers an equity stake in the project rather than just a fixed-price contract. The model was innovative but hard to close at scale.

Souki stepped down in 2023 as the project stalled.

Infrastructure contrarian. Souki identifies structural gaps in commodity markets, builds the physical infrastructure to fill those gaps, and holds for decades.

He does not trade around positions. He does not hedge sentiment.

He makes one enormous, thesis-driven bet and executes on it for years. The Sabine Pass terminal required securing regulatory approvals, lining up long-term customers, raising billions in project finance, and surviving a multi-year construction period.

That is not speculation. That is conviction carried to completion.

Sabine Pass. Souki took a half-built LNG import terminal, pivoted it to exports, fought for years to get regulatory approvals, raised billions in project finance, and shipped the first LNG cargo from the US continental shelf in February 2016.

Cheniere's stock price went from under $2 in 2012 to over $80 in 2014 during the approval frenzy. The company is now one of the world's largest LNG exporters.

He built infrastructure that reshaped global energy geopolitics.

Driftwood LNG at Tellurian. Souki spent years trying to build a second mega-LNG project using an equity participation model for buyers rather than traditional long-term supply agreements.

The thesis was sound. The financing never closed at the scale required.

He resigned in 2023 without seeing the project reach final investment decision. It is the sequel that did not get made.

Find the structural gap in a commodity market before anyone else does. Build the infrastructure to fill it.

Accept that the financing is going to be brutal, the critics are going to be loud, and the timeline is going to be longer than you planned. Then build it anyway.

Timing matters less than direction when you are building something the world will eventually need.

Souki was born in Beirut in 1952 to a Lebanese family. He immigrated to the US for his education and built his career in New York and Houston.

He has maintained strong connections to the Lebanese-American community throughout his business career.

Souki completed his undergraduate studies at the American University of Beirut before earning an MBA from Columbia Business School. The Columbia finance training gave him the tools to structure project finance deals that most energy executives of his generation would have handed to bankers.

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