My interest in natural gas stocks began in 1986

Renaissance Energy was my first serious investment in the space

In the summer of 1986, the late Crawford Gordon - then a stockbroker at Burns Fry - sent me a red herring for a proposed issue of convertible preferred shares of a small oil & gas company called Renaissance Energy. Ron Green and Clayton Woitas comprised the key management personnel, and the red herring described a strategy of exploitation of shallow gas fields. The strategy made sense to me so, through The Enfield Corporation Limited (“Enfield”) which I founded in April 1984, I bought $3,550,000 convertible preferred shares in the summer of 1986.

Later that year, the late Jack Lawrence, then Chairman of Burns Fry, called me to advise Burns was planning to underwrite an issue of two million Renaissance shares at $8.5 a share with a 4% underwriting fee. I asked if I could buy the whole issue and he refused, so I called Ron Green and offered on behalf of Enfield to buy 2 million treasury shares for $10 with no fee. Green agreed and Enfield did. Enfield sold a bit more than 300,000 of those shares for $7.5 million and by the summer of 1987 the remaining Renaissance holding was worth almost $50 million.

1987 was an interesting year, with a market crash October 19th of that year. Enfield avoided losing money in that crash by selling some its investments for a $110 million gain in year that ended June 30th, before the crash.

The October 1987 crash was irrelevant to Enfield which enjoyed profitable investments every year turning in some $217 million of investment income in the first four years of its existence.

Renaissance gave me the energy bug. I visited Renaissance management as part of my due diligence for the $20 million equity issue, met Ron Green, and visited every well site and spoke to the people on the ground and was impressed with their competence. Renaissance was eventually taken over by Husky in the year 2000, and Green and Woitas cashed in.

My friend, the late Dean Muncaster (once CEO of Canadian Tire and a director of Renaissance) lived in Collingwood as I did, so we would meet for breakfast at the old Craigleith General Store on Sunday mornings and talk about economics, the oil industry and politics. I miss Dean, who died while on vacation in Mexico in 2012. He was a prince of a guy and I learned a great deal from him.

Ron Green became Chairman of Husky after the 2000 merger, and I long ago lost touch with him and where he landed. While I have had no contact with Clayton Woitas since my Renaissance investment, I see he is still active in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin chairing the board of directors of Spur Petroleum, a fast growing heavy oil producer in the prolific Clearwater play. Like Allan Markin (whose carrer I chronicled in a previous article), Woitas earned a place in the Alberta Business Hall of Fame and had a storied career in the energy industry, named oilman of the year in 2003.

My early successes in energy investing arose from backing the right management teams. I learned from Ben Webster, President of Helix Investments in 1984 when I founded Enfield with his financial support, that the key to venture capital and to investing in general is to back the right people, not just the right idea. Ben died of cancer in December 1997 and I lost a close friend, mentor and the person who made it possible for me to go into business as CEO of my own start up, Enfield. Ben was an extraordinary person whose contribution to Canada is remembered in the legacy of the other companies Helix helped found - Mitel Corporation, Open Text, Hummingbird Communications, CAST container ships and even Velcro.