Excelerate Energy eyes deeper Jamaican spend year after billion-dollar LNG deal

A full year has passed since Excelerate Energy paid slightly more than US$1 billion to buy New Fortress Energy’s interests in Jamaica and step in as the nation’s liquefied natural gas provider. Speaking to the Jamaica Observer as that first year closed, president and chief executive Steven Kobos said the United States–based group still sees room to deepen its stake on the island.

“We do want to invest more. We do want to deploy more capital in Jamaica,” Kobos said. “Now, business around the world, it’s always a competition for capital. Where do you want to invest? But I like what I see about Jamaica after a year. I like the environment for foreign direct investment. I like the predictability and the stability that we see here, and I haven’t been shy about telling Wall Street that we are prepared to deploy more capital in Jamaica,” he added.

Kobos also spoke to the Sunday Observer. Uptake of LNG has fallen short of projections, he acknowledged, yet the firm is not discouraged and expects demand to build. “I think we’re getting there. I think we proved reliability. I mean, when I went around Montego Bay, [St James] two weeks after Hurricane Melissa [which hit Jamaica on October 28, 2025], I saw that the hotels where we provided off-grid power had never lost their power, had maintained their electricity, their lights, their air conditioning, and it made it easier for them to withstand the damage that they were confronting that they had that reliability.

“So I think that was a case study for the reliability of the power that we can provide, the value that we can provide. And as I said… just the fact that we could move the FSRU [floating storage and regasification unit] improved the long-term resiliency of that important facility,” Kobos said.

The company runs its FSRU off Old Harbour Bay on Jamaica’s south-eastern shoreline, roughly 3.6 miles out to sea. The vessel was shifted shortly ahead of Melissa’s landfall; Kobos said it was delivering LNG again within about three to four days once the Category 5 system had moved on, and he believes service could have resumed faster still. For him, that episode illustrates how dependable Excelerate can be in Jamaica and why stronger local adoption of LNG should follow. “It is going to come. It comes with the expansion of the economy, and we want to be part of that for the long haul. We’re not in this for six months… we are in this for a very long time,” he said.

Kobos maintained that his outlook on Jamaica’s economic path today matches the optimism he held when operations began a year ago. “I mean, lots of natural advantages; well-educated, hard-working human capital; a favourable investment climate… We go to markets all over the world [and] there are markets that we don’t seek to enter. We are very specific about those markets that we enter,” he said.

He stressed that before committing to any new territory Excelerate weighs whether buyers need its offerings today and whether that need will widen over time. “But you also need to be welcomed, you need to be treated fairly, and you just need to see that it’s a good place where … you can deploy more capital. It’s not everywhere that I would say we wish to deploy more capital there. It’s going to come,” he added.

Excelerate’s role, he noted, is to keep nations supplied with dependable energy, which underpins wider progress and everyday living standards. “Reliable energy is almost like water is to a body. It’s something that the larger economy and nation has to have. And so when you come into a role like that, it’s a matter of trust for us, and we have people in markets who count on us all over the world, and I’m just really pleased to include Jamaica with that,” he said.

“We have great people in the country, human talent; I have yet to meet my first unfriendly Jamaican. You know, it’s a great place, it’s great to interact with these people that make up this country, and we’re pleased with the investment decision,” he added.

Over the coming decades Excelerate aims to remain a steady partner for Jamaica, Kobos said, because “at the end of the day, we think… business is pretty simple. You need to have amazing operational performance — and we have a great operations team in Jamaica — do what you say you will do, and take responsibility for your actions. That’s business. That’s all you have to do, and then you’re going to succeed.

“We believe in providing the services that people want you to provide, so we are happy to work with the Government, happy to work with stakeholders, and make the right sorts of investments that will be best needed,” he said, adding that extra spending here could take several shapes. “That could be selling more natural gas to other people on the island, making more of it available to others on the island; that could be power generation; that could be natural gas pipelines, but, as I said, the reality is just whatever is most needed, that’s what we will want to provide,” he said, noting any expansion would stay inside the segments where the company already works.

“But we are anxious to deploy more… We are working on and do have ambition to make Jamaica into more of a regional hub… if Jamaica is the hub, working on different spokes out from the hub to distribute LNG around the Caribbean, and I would hope that in a year we will be advancing some of those small-scale distributions from our Jamaican hub. That’s the goal,” Kobos added.