LNG

Jan 27 (LNGJ) - Golar LNG has provided a further update on the formation of Cool Company Ltd along with Eastern Pacific Shipping, the Singapore-based shipping line. Golar and Eastern Pacific have agreed to join forces to run a Golar spin-off initially comprising eight tri-fuel, diesel-electric LNG carriers in the firm called CoolCo. Golar said that “based on investor feedback” CoolCo has now decided to launch a book-building process for a private placement of $250 million.

   “The anticipated proceeds, together with a contemplated debt refinancing, will be used to finance the acquisition of the 8 TFDE vessels from Golar, secure attractive financing and provide CoolCo with working capital,” it explained. “Eastern Pacific has pre-subscribed and guaranteed an allocation of a minimum $150M in the contemplated private placement,” it added. The book-building period in the placement is underway and closes on January 28 at 16:30 Central European Time.

Excelerate Energy, the US specialist and a market leader in floating storage and regasfication units (FSRUs), is preparing an initial public offering that will help test the appetite of investors for shares in the natural gas sector of the energy transition.

Excelerate has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to debut its shares and will be circulating a prospectus.

Excelerate intends to list its Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol “EE.”

Excelerate is based in The Woodlands in Houston in Texas and is part of a privately held US energy group founded by George Kaiser, owner of the Bank of Oklahoma.

The company has an operating fleet of 10 LNG FSRUs and is the pioneer of over a dozen import projects worldwide.

Execerate has also led the way in ship-to-ship LNG transfers as it started terminal operations in South America, the US, Europe and Asia.

“The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering are subject to market conditions and have not yet been determined,” said Excelerate in a statement.

Three banks have been nominated to serve as joint lead book-running managers for the proposed offering, Barclays of the UK and US investment banks J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley.

“The displacement of dirtier fossil fuels and the natural complement of LNG to a fast-growing renewables sector makes flexible floating LNG products, such as those provided by Excelerate, a part of the solution to decarbonization,” the company says.

In its latest terminal project Excelerate will help to stabilize the flow of supplies to Brazil through 2022 with a deal to deploy one of its existing FSRUs to the port of Salvador in the northeast state of Bahia.

Under the agreement with the South American country’s state-owned oil and gas company Petróleo Brasileiro Excelerate’s FSRU “Excelerate Sequoia” will supply up to 700 million cubic feet per day of regasified LNG.

TechnipFMC said it was launching a placement of 16 million shares in Technip Energies, one of the world’s leading liquefied natural gas engineering companies, representing around 9 percent of the outstanding share capital of Technip Energies.

GasLog Ltd, the LNG carrier fleet owner with 36 ships split with its US affiliate GasLog Partners, has held a private share placement “par excellence” with the participation of Greek and Chinese shipping dynasties, including the Tung family of China, the Onassis Foundation and the Greek Livanos family.

“I’m pleased to welcome the Tung family, with their long maritime history and roots in Asia, as shareholders,” said Paul Wogan, Chief Executive of GasLog.

“We look forward to working with them to deliver the value inherent in the GasLog fleet and our leading operating and commercial platform,” he added.

In 2017, the Tung family sold its controlling block of shares in Orient Overseas (International), the shipping company led by Tung Chee-hwa to China’s Cosco Shipping and Shanghai International Port Group.

The family received HK$34 billion (US$4.4Bln) from the transaction.

Orient Overseas was founded by Tung Chee-hwa's father, Tung Chao-yung, in 1969 and became the seventh-largest container shipping company in the world.

Clarksons Platou Securities AS acted as financial advisor to GasLog during the placement.

A special committee of the board of directors of GasLog, comprised entirely of independent members, reviewed the transaction.

Evercore served as financial advisor to the special committee.

In the placement, GasLog sold 14.40 million common shares at a price of $2.50 per share for total gross proceeds of $36.0M. The net proceeds of the placement are expected to be used for general corporate purposes.

About 75 percent of shares issued in the placement were purchased by GasLog’s directors and affiliates, including 6.50M shares purchased by Blenheim Holdings, wholly owned by the Livanos family and 4.0M common shares were purchased by an affiliate of the Onassis Foundation.

GasLog had posted a first-quarter 2020 loss as LNG demand faced multiple headwinds.

GasLog reported a quarterly net loss of $39.43 million versus a profit of $5.89M in the same three months a year ago.

In between the two earnings statements, GasLog brought in cost-cutting measures and among them was moving its headquarters from Monaco to the Greek port of Piraeus.

In the share placement, Blenheim Holdings also agreed not to sell the shares purchased for a period of 180 days.

“Our first-quarter results announcement set out a series of management actions to address the unprecedented market disruption caused by the Covid 19 pandemic,” said GasLog.

“We also updated the market on the progress of the refinancing of our 2021 debt maturities and the status of our interest rate and foreign exchange swap exposures,” it added.

In order to further supplement the management actions announced on May 6, 2020, the board has decided to raise $36M, or 17.8 percent percent of shares outstanding of the company prior to the private placement, to increase liquidity and further strengthen the capital structure of GasLog.

The board decided to execute the financing on a private placement basis with its core shareholders to provide both certainty and minimise any disruption against a volatile market backdrop.

CEO Wogan explained that he was delighted two of the major shareholders had provided this level of support to the company at this time and as they had done since GasLog’s initial public offering in 2012.

Tellurian Inc. closed its public offering of 10 million shares at $10.00 per share and its net proceeds amounted to $94.8 million to spend mostly on engineering and development expenses for the Driftwood LNG project in Louisiana.