Chariot Oil & Gas chief executive Adonis Pouroulis kicks off a conversation with a sobering observation on the state of the industry in 2020.

At the start of the last decade, he notes, ExxonMobil was the biggest company in the world. In August, the US supermajor fell off the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

“You can imagine what’s happening in the junior oil and gas space,” he says. “It’s carnage.”

This is hardly a revelation for Upstream readers but Pouroulis has a larger point to make.

“The big opportunity now lies in the company that can adapt to the new environment, which is really transition energy, and how you can reinvent yourself so that you remain relevant as an energy company,” he says.

It is a goal Pouroulis has set for Africa-focused, London-listed Chariot, which he co-founded in 2007 as one of the Pella Resources group of companies.

He served on the company’s board from its inception and was brought on as acting chief executive this past summer, as Chariot’s share price languished in the low single digits.

It has had a rebound in recent weeks, buoyed by some good news out of Morocco, where the company operates the Lixus block and its Anchois field.

A 2009 Eni gas discovery, Chariot acquired the offshore acreage last year and set about reinterpreting a mass of existing 3D seismic data — shot more than 10 years ago — using newer reprocessing technology.

“We are very, very excited about what we see," Pouroulis says.

Chariot expects an appraisal well next year will help boost contingent resources at Anchois enough to support a 70 million cubic feet per day subsea development and provide momentum for further exploration in the Lixus licence, which Pouroulis says could hold up to 4 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The company has garnered support from the African Finance Corporation as well as “another large bank” for a development, he says.

The gas could be routed to the Maghreb-Europe pipeline for export but Pouroulis says the primary destination should be the national power grid, which currently relies heavily on coal.

Do-or-die

Which brings Pouroulis back to the do-or-die role of juniors in the energy transition.

“I may be wrong, but I'm not sure whether now — and for the next few years — there is going to be much capital around for people who raise their hand and say, ‘we want to raise money purely to explore for oil and gas’. I think it's getting really difficult,” he says.

Instead, companies need to demonstrate a commitment to “transition energy” and present plans that will help reduce emissions — in Chariot’s case, providing gas as a cleaner alternative in Morocco, where energy demand is escalating.

The company has a leg up, he says, because of Pella Group’s long history in African mining operations.

“Chariot is a company born out of Africa, and it can leverage off a very, very strong African footprint by leaning on all its sister companies,” he says.

Pouroulis himself comes from a mining background, having studied mining engineering in his native South Africa before going to work in gold mines and, in the early 1990s, setting up Blue Diamond Mines, the precursor of Petra Diamonds.

In 1997, Petra became the first diamond company to be listed on London’s AIM exchange. “I was a young man — I was 26 at the time,” he says. “I only stepped down this year as chairman.”

Pouroulis entered the oil business when he took some Namibian offshore acreage off the hands of a friend and Petra investor.

“Long and short is, I bought these concessions and I went into the oil industry, and that became Chariot,” he says.

The company found “ex-Petrobras engineers and geologists to do the work for us” and went public in 2008.

A couple of exploration wells turned up dry, and while wildcatting is out of the question in the current environment, Chariot believes the Namibian acreage, as well as its assets in Brazil, could draw interest as conditions improve.

Transition

But the first order of business is Morocco, where Pouroulis wants to prove the company’s new transition strategy.

"We want to develop that aggressively because we've got a discovery there,” he says. Beyond that lie the company’s “alternative energy” ambitions that, leveraging the parent organisation’s assets, could include batteries, wind and solar.

“We've got this footprint in Africa, where Chariot has an advantage to be providing and selling energy to anything from mining companies to breweries to governments,” he says.

Pouroulis, who lives in London, has a passion for archaeology (“I’m of Greek origin, of course”) and astronomy.

He is also involved in two charitable organisations within Pella Group: the Pouroulis Foundation, which benefits children’s health and education in Africa and India, and the South Africa-based Music for the Children Foundation, founded with his brother, that raises money for nutrition and health care and funds some archaeological digs.

Morocco — “growing rapidly as an industrial base, a manufacturing base” — will see energy demand ramp up, Pouroulis insists.

It will happen elsewhere in Africa, but he believes progress need not come at a steep environmental cost.

Like its much bigger rivals, Chariot is evolving beyond its oil and gas roots.

“Chariot was a pure oil and gas player in the past,” Pouroulis says.

“Today, it's a gas player, certainly. But it's going to be playing in this transition space. You better believe it.”

Exploration

'The big opportunity now lies in the company that can adapt' - Chariot boss Pouroulis