LONDON - Riverstone Holdings, a U.S. private equity fund, said on Tuesday it was planning an initial public offering of an energy investment company on the London Stock Exchange in late October.
The listing of the new company, to be called Riverstone Energy Ltd., will be priced to raise up to £1.5 billion, or $2.4 billion, the firm said Tuesday.
It will give Riverstone, one of the few large private equity funds that specialize in energy investments, a publicly listed vehicle and will expand its international presence. Riverstone has been largely focused on North American investments, although it does have a European wing that is headed by John Browne, the former chief executive of BP.
Among Riverstone’s investments are Cuadrilla Resources, the British shale gas company that has drawn the ire of environmentalists, and Cobalt International Energyl, a U.S.-based exploration company that has made deepwater discoveries including off Angola. Lord Browne is chairman of Cuadrilla.
Riverstone Energy Ltd. already has commitments of £550 million from cornerstone investors including Hunt Oil, an investment company of the hedge fund manager Louis Bacon, and an investment company set up by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests a portion of the state’s mineral royalties.
The company will make investments alongside Riverstone’s most recent, $7.7 billion private equity fund, called Global Energy and Power Fund V. The initial public offering is being marketed to British institutional investors.
Riverstone, which was founded in 2000 by two former Goldman Sachs bankers, Pierre F. Lapeyre and David M. Leuschen, has raised a total of $25 billion. According to the statement Tuesday, Riverstone investments have earned a net overall rate of return of 20 percent since its founding.
The new company’s board will be chaired by Sir Robert Wilson, a former Chairman of BG, a large British oil and gas company. Other board members will include the Riverstone founders, Lord Browne, and James Hackett, a Riverstone partner who was formerly chief excutive of Anadarko Petroleum, the U.S. independent oil company.
Both Lord Browne and Mr. Hackett have also recently joined the advisory board of L1 Energy, an energy investment fund established by Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, the former Russian partners of BP, to invest the proceeds of the sale of their share of TNK-BP, to Rosneft, the state oil company.
