Aubrey McClendon awoke that Tuesday, because he had 10,000 times before, ready to work a deal.
Aubrey McClendon dies at 56: Former Chesapeake CEO was a mythical character who pioneered the shale revolution
Aubrey McClendon was the face from the nation’s gas boom, a swashbuckling innovator who pioneered a shale revolution.
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McClendon, co-founder of Chesapeake Energy Corp., had ridden more wild good and the bad in America’s energy patch than simply about anyone. But on March 1, because the world closed in on him, McClendon had something else on his mind. That morning he was e-mailing about a riverfront development in his hometown of Oklahoma City, the place where he’d gambled a lot for so long.
The 56-year-old sounded upbeat, optimistic – he sounded, in short, like himself.
Twenty-four hours later, he was dead.
By the world knows the broad outlines. Around the morning of March 2, hours after being charged with rigging bids for oil- and gas-drilling rights, McClendon slipped from his security team and climbed into his 2013 Chevy Tahoe. He sped north along a lonesome two-lane stretch of Midwest Boulevard, toward the prairie-scrub city edge, where he drove his SUV right into a wall at high speed.
The news reverberated through Oklahoma City like a thunderclap. There, and as a long way away as Riyadh and Caracas, everybody in the energy game knew the backstory. McClendon, the man who’d told OPEC to go to hell, had vowed to fight the indictment. This: the tragic end to some life that seemed to epitomize America’s shale boom – and its bust.
A week on, with many still can not make sense of everything, situations surrounding McClendon’s death are only now entering focus. Police in Oklahoma City say they’ve yet to determine when the crash, which involved not one other vehicle, was intentional. Emails McClendon sent to business associates hours before held no clues, no hints of trouble.
“It is hard for us to understand that he is really gone,” Tom Blalock, an executive at American Energy Partners LP, the venture McClendon founded after Chesapeake ousted him, told the some four-thousand people gathered at Crossings Community Church in Oklahoma City on Monday at a public memorial.
It is difficult for all of us to comprehend that he is really gone
Yet, right to the end, McClendon seemed to be hatching plans.
That was pure McClendon. His rise and fall was the stuff of legend. He started to be a towering figure because they build Chesapeake into a $37.5 billion company, because of his championing of controversial hydraulic fracturing. However the very gas boom he helped create caused prices to plummet, clipping the company’s value by over fifty percent and triggering a shareholder revolt that led to McClendon’s ouster.
He then formed American Energy Partners and raised a lot more than $10 billion to accumulate drilling rights from the Appalachian Mountains to Australia and Argentina. But that business, too, would soon buckle underneath the weight of collapsing energy prices.
This may be the story of his final days, pieced together from interviews with individuals who spent time with McClendon or were in contact with him during his last week of life. The image that emerges is one of a guy emboldened and energized – willing and able to turn a new corner.
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Cutting Ties
Like everyone in the shale patch, McClendon – cocky, bold, seemingly indefatigable – have been staring down the collapse in energy prices for months. But his world darkened considerably within the week before the crash. As of Friday, Feb. 26, one of his biggest financial backers, the power & Minerals Group, a private-equity firm led by John Raymond, had basically cut ties with him, based on a letter Raymond later sent to investors. That raised immediate questions about American Energy’s viability.
That afternoon, he drove over to Pops on Avondale Drive in Nichols Hills Plaza, about a minute away from his sprawling white stone house. A contemporary rendition of a classic mid-century diner, Pops features about 500 kinds of soda, from Catoosa Cream to Grape Plains, as well as an All-American menu ranging from BBQ wraps to quarter-pound deep-fried hotdogs. It’s certainly one of a half-dozen or so restaurants he co-owned around Oklahoma City, including the original Pops, famous for its 66-foot-high sculpture of the soda bottle along the side of the famed Route 66, 30 minutes outside of town.
Duck-Fat Fries
Later that day, McClendon visited another restaurant venture in the same shopping centre, the swanky Coach House. It has been a town fixture because it opened in 1985, during one of the toughest economic slumps in modern Oklahoma history. He often used the rear room being an extension of his office, entertaining visiting bankers and businessmen with plates of duck-fat fries and his encyclopedic knowledge of wine. McClendon was there to meet with co-owner Kurt Fleischfresser to discuss renovation plans. He had just one question: Are they going to keep the back room as the work continued? Fleischfresser assured him they’d.
“He had a super amount of energy,” Fleischfresser said. “He always made you want to do good while he am excited to get it done.”
Front-Row Seat
Good news, though, was scarce for McClendon everywhere he went, even a trip on Saturday night to watch a Thunder game, the basketball team he partially owned and helped bring to Oklahoma City from Seattle. Wearing a blue-shirt, sleeves rolled-up, he took his usual front-row seat on the baseline near the Thunder bench.
He always made for you to do good while he was so excited to do it.
What looked to become a brief respite from his business woes turned into a heart-breaker. McClendon could only stand together with his hands at his sides as Golden State Warriors’ star Steph Curry sank a last-second three-pointer to hand the Thunder an overtime loss. McClendon left exactly the same way he always did, walking through the private back corridor of Chesapeake Arena.
By Tuesday morning – one previous day he died and just hours before the world learned of his indictment – McClendon was still being firing off e-mails on future projects.
White-Water Rapids
Among those he messaged was Mike Knopp, a lawyer-turned-rowing-coach who was as close to McClendon as just about anybody. The happy couple had been focusing on the final phase of a decade-long project to change a waterless, grassy ditch steps from downtown into a US$100 million Olympic rowing venue. The nonprofit Oklahoma City Boathouse Foundation, with McClendon as chairman and Knopp as executive director, was two weeks from completing a white-water rapids course for the May 7 U.S. Olympic slalom trials.
In McClendon’s final e-mail exchange with Knopp, the topic was mundane: looking for a date for their next foundation board meeting.
At around 5:30 p.m., a federal grand jury in downtown Oklahoma City handed up the indictment. McClendon quickly cried foul.
“I’ve been designated because the only part of the gas and oil industry in over 110 years because the Sherman Act became law to have been charged with this crime in relation to joint bidding on leasehold,” McClendon said inside a statement within hours from the indictment. “I’ll battle to prove my innocence and also to clear my name.”
‘Best to See You’
Around 8:00 a.m. the following morning, a company associate received an e-mail from McClendon. The 2 had noticed each other the evening before in an Oklahoma City restaurant where McClendon was dining together with his daughter, Callie Katt. McClendon seemed normal, the person later told Marcus Rowland, who spent 18 years as Chesapeake’s chief financial officer under McClendon. The e-mail was nothing more than a “best to help you last night” and discussion of some business matters, Rowland said.
Not long after McClendon sent that message, he climbed into his SUV and drove off. Because he cruised north along a two-lane country highway, he acquired speed, traveling well over the posted 50 mph. With thick, bushy trees on sides from the road , McClendon had limited maneuvering room. His car collided with a concrete wall supporting a highway overpass at 9:12, based on the initial police report.
Hit Head-On
The details of the crash have police investigators scratching their heads: The front-end of his car hit the overpass support head-on. They have yet to find out whether or not this was an accident or perhaps a suicide but their early comments suggest the embattled shale tycoon may have intentionally crashed his car.
“He pretty much drove straight into the wall,” officer Paco Balderrama said soon after the crash. “There is lots of chance of him to fix and obtain back around the roadway, and that didn’t occur.”
As dusk focused on the desolate site eventually following the crash, Oklahoma’s famous red-toned dirt had turned an acrid, charred black. A makeshift memorial marked the website of impact: yellow and red roses placed carefully in the base of two crosses adorned with baseball caps and draped with pink and white polka dot ties Body of McClendon’s favourite patterns. Just one, white Chesapeake hard hat lay within the dirt.
– With assistance from Dan Murtaugh, Joe Carroll and Alex Nussbaum.
Bloomberg News
