Lord Energy Blazes New Frontiers in the Oil Commodities Industry

Lord Energy has never been a company that shies away from the future — and today, that future rests in Russian oil. In early June, the Lugano-based commodities merchant took its first step into a new niche by signing a six-month deal with the Chinese oil and gas conglomerate, CEFC China Energy. Under the newly-minted agreement, Lord Energy will transport one 80,000-tonne cargo of Russian Urals per month for the next six months. The monthly transport will leave from Novorossiysk, Russia's foremost port on the Black Sea. Significantly, the CEFC only takes two cargoes of the Russian oil blend from Novorossiysk each month; the limited shipments thus places a heavy privilege and responsibility on Lord Energy's transports. The company's expansion to Urals — a cohesive mix of light oil from Western Siberia and heavy sour oil from the Ural Mountains and the Volga region — constitutes a new opportunity in regional expansion for the Swiss trader.

While Lord Energy's reach into the Black Sea is exciting, it isn't wholly unexpected; the company has been on the path towards establishing a greater presence in the oil trading industry for a while. Over the course of the last few years, Lord Energy has ferried oil extracted from fields in Algeria, Brazil, Colombia, Libya, and — more recently — Nigeria. Prior to the deal with CEFC, the Swiss trader moved approximately three to four million barrels of crude oil monthly and fully intends to increase its capacity to triple its current volume over the next eighteen months. The expansion into the Urals play a key role in this plan: while the current end users for the oil remain primarily in Asia and the United States, the company hopes that it will soon be able to forge similar trade bonds with refiners in the European market around the Russian-sourced oil.

To its credit, Lord Energy is well-versed in this kind of incremental but effective expansion. As Dr. Hazim Nada, founder and managing director for the company, commented in a profile for Reuters: "Our key to success has been in developing new markets for either established grades or finding new niches for difficult grades." This strategy has brought Nada and his company quite a few respectable successes. The Swiss company recently broke a three-decade-long trade lull in Australia when it brought in an Algerian-made Saharan oil blend to the country. It made similar strides in Asia when it ferried the very first cargo of Saharan crude oil into the Chinese private sector.

The company currently maintains presences not only in its home of Lugano but also in Houston, Texas, and Singapore. Not one to rest on his accomplishments, Hazim Nada has publicly stated his intent to expand Lord Energy's reach into the U.S. export-import market and augment the company's oil holdings with liquefied natural gas by the close of 2019.

Such forward-thinking expansion might seem somewhat ambitious — even audacious — to those unfamiliar with the company, but news of Hazim Nada's plans would likely fail to surprise anyone who has paid attention to Lord Energy's growth over the past decade. When the company first launched in 2008, it did not ferry loads of crude oil, natural gas, or even dry coal across oceans — in fact, it hardly carried anything at all. Dr. Hazim Nada began building the foundation for Lord Energy in the final year of his post-doctoral studies at Imperial College London. At the time, Nada was studying quantum physics; he had previous academic training in applied mathematics during his undergraduate years. Both fields of study served him well as an entrepreneur and investment professional, as did the connections he had previously built whilst making energy-centered trades in the financial sector. Hazim Nada founded Lord Energy in 2008; during its initial two years in business, the company focused solely on providing market analysis and business development consultations to the companies Nada had established connections with during his time as a trader for Merrill Lynch and Citibank.

As the company’s current strategies and successes suggest, however, consulting was never going to be Lord Energy or Hazim Nada’s endgame. After the Great Financial Crisis wound down in 2010, Nada opted to take a risk and move into the low-cost sector of dry bulk commodities. He began his first shipping endeavors with cargoes of bagged cement and grain, putting the products up as principle. Within the next few years, Lord Energy dominated the Mediterranean cement import market; by 2016, the company had single-handedly carried a full twenty percent of all bagged cement moving across the region. The shift into dry bulk commodities allowed Nada and Lord Energy to establish a springboard into the energy-based cargoes it is so well-known for now, such as oil and gasoline. Perhaps most impressive is the company's independence: from the time of its founding to today, Lord Energy has never relied on financial support from outside investors venture capitalists to fund its quest for success.

Today, Lord Energy stands as a multibillion-dollar venture with a reputation for quality, reliability, continuity, and high performance. Its growth from a small consulting firm into a multinational trading company is inspiring — and the organization’s history of ambitious achievement renders the company's current efforts towards expansion both wholly unsurprising and remarkably exciting. The recent deal brokered between the energy trader and the CEFC only proves that Lord Energy has the inclination and footholds it needs to grow into its prime as an international player in the dry bulk and liquid energy commodities sectors. The path that growth takes may not be clear, but the surety of it is: those in the field can certainly expect more industry trailblazing from Lord Energy in the years to come.

Lord Energy is an internationally-active trader based out of Lugano, Switzerland and headed by Hazim Nada. It specializes in conveying both dry commodities such as cement and grain and a variety of liquid energy products including crude oil and gasoline across seaborne trade routes.