Meet the Bronx-born billionaire exporting America's shale gas bonanza:
Shale Gas Billionaire: Michael Smith at his massive LNG operation on Quintana Island, Texas, which is now shipping out more than 2% of the United States’ natural-gas production. “It’s my baby,” he says.How Michael S. Smith salvaged a wrong-way bet on fracking by building a $14 billion plant in Texas to ship gas around the globe. uintana Island is a 7-mile speck of land off Freeport, Texas, tucked in where the Brazos River empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
Liquefying gas involves chilling methane down into a -260-degree liquid that can be pumped into thermos-bottle tankers and then shipped around the world. To do so economically, Freeport LNG has erected some of the world’s biggest LNG machines, called “trains.” It started by hammering 36,000 pilings 100 feet into mushy Quintana ground. Atop that now stands enough steel to build six Eiffel Towers and 192 miles of gleaming pipe, all anchored in 496,000 tons of concrete.
Smith is a large man, who at age 66 is still skiing and scuba diving despite some replacement joints. He has a lopsided nose and plenty of “da Bronx” still in his voice. His father ran a business involved in turning garbage into fuel. Smith studied premed at Colorado State University, but his senior year he “realized I was going to be a doctor for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.” So he dropped out and became a Vail ski bum.
Just 45, Smith had a fortune, but he wasn’t ready to hit the slopes full time. In 2001, at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, he met Charif Souki, a former investment banker and restaurateur with a small gas company called Cheniere Energy. They both believed the United States would soon need to import gas. Souki had scoured the Gulf Coast for prime LNG locations and had options on three sites, including Freeport. Smith could have thrown in his lot with Souki, but he wanted to run his own show.
Most Nimby conflicts were resolved when Freeport LNG bought and demolished some 60 homes on the island. The biggest frustration was Hurricane Harvey, which dumped 2 feet of rain in 2017 and ruined equipment. Finally, in late 2019, Freeport LNG was operational. “He built it. It’s finished. He has accomplished something remarkable and done a phenomenal job,” says Souki, a friendly rival, who in 2015 left Cheniere to start LNG developer Tellurian Energy.
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