RE: Man with the golden gas fields3 May 2021 22:37
and Zoom calls, and for it to be 100 per cent oversubscribed, was pretty satisfying,” Larkin says.
It was, he adds, a “big validation” of the management team and the quality of the Egyptian asset. Low operating costs ensured the field made a profit in a year when oil prices averaged $37 a barrel. “The real test of any asset is how they perform in a low-price environment,” Larkin says. “Our assets passed the test.”
In total, United has identified more than 30 drilling prospects at the Abu Sennan acreage. It is sitting on potentially many years of development, which will be funded by the cash generated from existing production.
“There is so much organic growth there, we will not need to step outside the business to work out the various programmes,” Larkin says excitedly.
It was a quantum leap. “We have gone through the gears very quickly to get to a plateau of production in less than three years of being a listed company.”
For an enterprise that operated from Larkin’s front room less than six years ago, it has been quite the rise. “The company has really shot out of the blocks — it’s been an adventure,” he says.
Hailing from Coolock, a working-class suburb in north Dublin, Larkin has always been ambitious. As a teenager, for an odd job, he washed Sir Anthony O’Reilly’s Bentley — the Heinz chairman’s Dublin chauffeur was a near neighbour. After school he joined Cregan & Associates, an accountancy firms in Swords, north Co Dublin, as a trainee.
Early in Larkin’s training, Maurice Cregan, the managing partner, advised him that a career in audit was unlikely and his skills would be more suited to corporate advisory, working with owner-managed small and medium-sized companies on acquisitions and financing. It offered an early grounding in running a business and deal-making.
A chance meeting with Stephen Carroll, then the finance director of Providence Resources, led to a job in the oil industry. Tony O’Reilly Jr, then Providence chief executive, stumped up company money for Larkin to complete an MBA — a gesture for which he remains genuinely grateful.
He then moved to the fast-rising Tullow Oil. Within 12 months of his joining, Tullow, led by Aidan Heavey, was elevated into the FTSE 100. Larkin spent six heady years there, working across the globe, with stints in Suriname, Bangladesh and Africa. He worked in the finance department, making sure Tullow’s money was being well spent on drilling projects in far-flung places.
For all the glamour of travel to exotic places, he yearned to start his own company. In 2015, when oil prices crashed, Larkin took the leap. He says that United, named after his favourite football club Manchester United, was ten years in germination. “I thought it was perfect timing,” he says. “I believe in the oil and gas price cycle. It washes out. I felt it was time to acquire assets at the bottom of price cycle and, invariably, as the cycle washed out, they would be worth more than we paid for them. And
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