Tower Resources chief executive Jeremy Asher was a late-comer to the upstream business.

However, he felt well-positioned for the move, having concluded a successful career as a downstream number cruncher, grappling with the above-ground challenges of European petrochemicals and the refining industry.

In the late 1990s, he was thinking about retirement. Asher had spent years in management consultancy, starting out as a Shell analyst and rising to head up Glencore’s global oil products trade before acquiring and turning around the 275,000 barrels per day Beta oil refinery at Wilhelmshaven, Germany, then selling it off.

“We’d done very well and I was looking for a new deal, possibly upstream," Asher says. "But it was a dull time. Oil prices dipped to $14 per barrel. So it wasn’t a good entry point, even for a pro, which I was not.”

Instead, he was headhunted in the spring of 1998 to Jon Moynihan’s London-based PA Consulting with a remit to inject a bit of entrepreneurial spirit.

“It wasn’t moving, so I grew the company into Europe, built the US business and doubled our size, and along the way got myself an upstream education,” he recalls.

His first exposure to the travails of offshore contracting — he won’t name the outfit — put him on a steep learning curve.

“I discovered what an FPSO was, and why under-bidding them can be ruinous,” he says.

Asher loves building things and enjoyed managing all the advice flooding in from some 200 partners whom he describes as expert, intelligent people.

“It was a bit like running a very large company, but by the end of 2001, I felt it was time to move on. And in 2002, the tech run was already in free fall,” he says.

Challenges

Asher likes a good challenge. "I am not not a consolidator," he says. But some challenges are best avoided.

“Jon and I shared an ambition to take over Arthur D Little," the venerable management consultancy that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002.

“But markets were contracting and they wound up too far below the waterline, leaving us both disappointed.”

Casting around for opportunities, he happened upon veteran Africa upstream players and Global Petroleum board members Peter Blakey and Peter Taylor, and was inspired by their prospects in Uganda and Kenya.

“They brought in US banker Mark Savage and that was the beginning of Tower Resources, also focusing on African opportunities. So I joined the board with 10% and became the fourth musketeer,” he says.

Now, as chairman and chief executive of the AIM-listed company, Asher finds himself navigating the demands of exploration plays from southern Africa to Cameroon, and even the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, a territory unrecognised in Europe and the Americas.

Born in 1958, he grew up just a stone’s throw from London’s Fulham Road, getting packed off to the Dragon School in Oxford at the age of eight, then to Westminster’s Great School in London before exams.

“Dad was a wine merchant back in the early sixties," Asher says. "He’d just throw stuff in the back of our Triumph TR4 and take off for weeks at a time, dragging me and my little brother up and down the Rhone, Bordeaux and back via the Loire Valley and Champagne. I still love wine from the Saumur region.”

When the UK economy hit the buffers in the late 1960s, his father relocated to the US, penning a monthly column for New York’s Gourmet Magazine and even sitting on the committee that first defined the Napa Valley wine region. School vacations were spent in New York and San Francisco.

Asher postponed his place at the London School of Economics to play in a punk band, later picking lead guitar at party venues across California.

However, he did manage to squeeze in a BSc in mathematical economics and econometrics, later gaining an MBA from Harvard, which he has found useful for the the oil business.

“People said you can’t calculate your competitors’ costs, you can’t predict what might be acceptable margins in the future, but I’d rather collate information from a great number of fuzzy data points than have very little data from a clutch of perfect ones,” he says.

Big break

With Shell, Asher applied his modelling skills to figure out yield and opportunity costs at downstream facilities across Europe. And it worked.

His real break came in 1984, when he joined the commodities company Glencore, formerly Marc Rich + Partners, which was trying to refill its ranks and restore its reputation following founder Rich's 1983 indictment for tax evasion.

“All the senior guys left to enjoy their yachts, so the company was hiring again," Asher says.

"A friend there said he would teach me trading if I told him all I knew about oil products.”

The oil companies had all that excess capacity but could not market it internationally, so Asher was able to carry out the cross-continental trade and do the big arbitrages.

"The idea of adding value to under-capacity was what originally inspired me to go into refining,” he says.

If he ever needs a break from the arduous task of building value at Tower, he can always take refuge at the family hacienda just north of San Diego, where tennis is on tap and perhaps, too, a glass of his favourite Williams Selyem Pinot Noir from California’s celebrated coastal vineyards.

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Asher's Towering ambition