Dealing with the state
A state-owned partner is several counterparties at once. On who really decides, the political calendar, the partner who is also your regulator, and how long to wait.
Private energy investment
Voxen Energy invests in pipeline gas, LNG and the infrastructure that moves them, across Asia-Pacific, Africa and South America. We underwrite the plant, the contracts and the people who run them — then we commit our own capital.
Voxen Energy is a private investment company. We buy and hold positions in pipeline gas, LNG and the infrastructure that moves them.
The capital is our own. There is no fund behind us, no outside investors to report to and no deadline to deploy by, which means we can look at a situation for as long as it takes to understand it, and say no without explaining ourselves to anybody.
What we bring first is not the cheque. It is a view on whether the gas is deliverable, whether the party obliged to lift it can pay, and whether the people running the asset have run one before. Owners deal with us for that. The capital follows.
The energy system is being rebuilt around gas as the bridge fuel and the infrastructure that moves it. Our focus is the physical assets in that chain, and the businesses that operate them.
Supply, liquefaction, regasification and the offtake arrangements that underwrite them. The core of the mandate, and where the next two decades of demand sit.
Storage, terminals, jetties, pipelines and port-side assets. The interfaces where schedules slip and budgets go, and where most of the technical risk in a project sits.
Distressed positions, stalled projects and restructurings, where the problem is technical or operational and we can see what it would take to fix.
Most of what goes wrong in this business was visible on site long before it reached a model.
We underwrite the physical business, not the spreadsheet. Feedgas deliverability, train utilisation, boil-off, jetty availability, the tenor of an offtake against the tenor of its debt. These decide whether a project earns what its model says it will, and most of them are visible to anyone who has stood on the site and read the contracts properly.
That view came from the operating side. Two decades negotiating off-take with state-owned enterprises and working alongside the people who run terminals and supply chains teaches you which technical assumptions hold and which ones are there to make a financing work.
It also means we are useful to an operator beyond the cheque. We have views on counterparties, on contract structure, and on where a project's real exposure sits. Owners deal with us because of that, not in spite of it.
Capital is our own, so an answer is a decision rather than a recommendation. We don't publish a pipeline and we announce nothing on our own account.
We work where gas infrastructure is being built rather than refinanced.
Three tests an asset has to pass before capital goes anywhere near it.
The plant, the jetty, the pipeline connection and the storage. We look at what has been built and what it can actually do before we look at what it is projected to earn.
Revenue we can read in an agreement rather than a forecast. Offtake and tolling terms, destination flexibility, credit behind the obligation, and tenor that matches the debt above it.
Assets run by people who can run them. Most failures in this sector are operational or upstream of the plant, not commercial, and they show up on site long before they show up in a set of accounts.
We are small on purpose. The people who look at an asset are the people who decide on it, and whoever signs is in the room from the first meeting.
The background is operational rather than financial — off-take negotiated with state counterparties, terminal and supply contracts read from the owner's side, and the restructurings that follow when a project underdelivers against its technical case. We use external engineers and counsel where the work demands it, and we don't pretend to be them.
There is no investment committee to present to, and no credit process running in parallel to the commercial one. An answer from us is a decision.
The bench is operational, not financial.
“Almost everything that has cost me money in this business was visible before the money went out, and almost none of it was in the model.
Twenty-plus years of deals across resources and international finance — mineral off-take with Chinese state-owned enterprises, terminals, supply contracts and the restructurings that followed when they went wrong — teaches you where to look. Whether the gas is really deliverable. Whether the party obliged to lift can pay. Whether the people running the asset have run one before.
Voxen is built to underwrite those questions properly, in LNG, pipeline gas and the infrastructure around them, and to back the answer with our own capital.”
Danny TopperbergManaging Director
Full profile. More at dannytopperberg.com. Read What we look at for how we underwrite these assets.
Occasional writing on how these assets are structured and where they come apart.
A state-owned partner is several counterparties at once. On who really decides, the political calendar, the partner who is also your regulator, and how long to wait.
“Firm” is a word with a lot of hiding places. On volume commitment language, the entity actually on the other side, the shelf life of a pricing formula, and tenor against debt.
Four things decide whether an LNG or gas infrastructure asset earns what it is supposed to — and where these projects actually come apart.
What you learn before anyone opens a spreadsheet. Who they bring, what they ask first, and how they handle a question they don't like.
We answer email. We don't take unsolicited pitches from advisers, but we do read introductions from people we know.