''My father and I have a commitment to the energy business and to helping our country move towards sustainability and energy independence. Zilkha Biomass Energy is the third endeavor in our twenty-year partnership in energy. As in our previous two businesses, we are investing our time and capital towards the development and application of new technologies.
We started Zilkha Energy Company in the 1980s. We explored for hydrocarbons in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico. We loved our business and were the largest acreage owners on the Gulf of Mexico shelf with over one and a half million acres under lease, and an enormous seismic database. We were one of the first companies to use 3D seismic for exploration, but as competitors followed and as our daily production of hydrocarbons rose, it became more and more difficult to replace reserves. We opted to sell our company in 1998, and we went into the wind energy business soon after.
In 2005, we sold our wind energy company, Zilkha Renewable Energy, to Goldman Sachs. We had become one of the largest wind developers in the United States, with over 250,000 acres under lease all the way from New York to California. We had also built several hundred megawatts of projects. Once again we loved our business, and we were very proud of the organization and portfolio which we had developed. But as the business grew, it required greater financial strength than we could bring to it. Individual projects, which had originally cost in the tens of millions of dollars, had become much larger and now ran to the hundreds of millions of dollars. Goldman Sachs, with its financial strength, financing expertise, and access to large sums of capital, was a more logical owner. I remain on the board of Horizon Wind Energy, as it is now called, and my father and I maintain an interest in the future of the new company.
My father and I have a commitment to the energy business and to helping our country move towards sustainability and energy independence. Zilkha Biomass Energy is the third endeavor in our twenty-year partnership in energy. As in our previous two businesses, we are investing our time and capital towards the development and application of new technologies.
We started Zilkha Energy Company in the 1980s. We explored for hydrocarbons in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico. We loved our business and were the largest acreage owners on the Gulf of Mexico shelf with over one and a half million acres under lease, and an enormous seismic database. We were one of the first companies to use 3D seismic for exploration, but as competitors followed and as our daily production of hydrocarbons rose, it became more and more difficult to replace reserves. We opted to sell our company in 1998, and we went into the wind energy business soon after.
In 2005, we sold our wind energy company, Zilkha Renewable Energy, to Goldman Sachs. We had become one of the largest wind developers in the United States, with over 250,000 acres under lease all the way from New York to California. We had also built several hundred megawatts of projects. Once again we loved our business, and we were very proud of the organization and portfolio which we had developed. But as the business grew, it required greater financial strength than we could bring to it. Individual projects, which had originally cost in the tens of millions of dollars, had become much larger and now ran to the hundreds of millions of dollars. Goldman Sachs, with its financial strength, financing expertise, and access to large sums of capital, was a more logical owner. I remain on the board of Horizon Wind Energy, as it is now called, and my father and I maintain an interest in the future of the new company.''
