DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

Jay Reynolds and Ellen Ruhotas tell Tank Storage Magazine how Zenith is serving customers and facing the energy transition head-on. In 2014, terminal industry veteran Jeff Armstrong decided to set up a new midstream company, having left Kinder Morgan, where he was president, in 2013. The new company, he decided, needed to be smaller, more aggressive, more creative, more responsive, and more customer-focussed, than the companies already existing. With US$600 million (€590.2 million) in backing from private equity firm Warburg Pincus and US$100 million from co- investors, friends and family, Zenith Energy was born. Initially, the company sought opportunities in the Atlantic basin outside of the US. Early on, Zenith formed a joint venture Colombian group to build a greenfield terminal in Barranquilla, as Jay Reynolds, chief commercial officer of Zenith Energy explains, ‘to capitalise on some of the logistical bottlenecks in that particular area of Columbia.’ Initially the terminal was around 350,000 bbl in size but since commissioning in 2016 has been expanded to around 500,000 bbl. It handles refined products, vegetable oils (particularly sustainable palm oil) and...