Horse Hill Developments

This article is part of the Spinwatch Fracking Portal and project

Horse Hill Developments Ltd is drilling an exploratory oil and gas well at Horse Hill, a picturesque patch of Surrey countryside a few miles north of Gatwick airport in the UK.

The firm's director David Lenigas says the site could yield 80 million barrels of oil and 160 billion cubic feet of gas, worth £2 billion. Esso drilled this same site back in the 1960s, finding oil but in uncommercial quantities.

Lenigas insisted in October 2014 that he will not use fracking on the site.

I am a landowner and the farmer as well in the UK. I would not want fracking on my land and I certainly would not be doing fracking in Horley. I can absolutely guarantee that.

...I have publicly stated in an open forum that there will be no fracking at the Horse Hill site.

People

David Lenigas is an Australian businessman turned serial entrepeneur. In October 2014 the Financial Times reported that a directors’ disclosure issued in 2013 by Inspirit Energy, an innovative energy technology firm where Lenigas is chairman, 'indicated he had sat on 173 company boards during the previous five years.

The list has been severely pruned more recently – and in ways that surprised many of his followers. At the end of August he resigned as chairman of the eponymous Leni Gas & Oil. It’s not often that a director’s departure necessitates a change of company name, but this Trinidadian oil producer, which spent years as a “sub-penny dreadful” before taking off this spring, will henceforth be known simply as LGO.

... Mr Lenigas took the helm at Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho conglomerate back in 2006 at a point when the business had dwindled to just one asset – the Cardoso hotel in Maputo. He rebuilt it as an Africa-focused agri-business, but in subsequently selling the company to Swiss investors last year, he fell out badly with the new owners in a row that extended to another Lenigas venture, African low-cost airline Fastjet. Right now, aside from Horse Hill, Mr Lenigas’ interests are focused on Inspirit, the energy company, and also Rare Earth Minerals, with a large interest in a potentially huge lithium deposit in Mexico.

Partners

• Magellan Petroleum Corporation
• Alba Mineral Resources owns owns five per cent of Horse Hill Developments Ltd

Affiliations

• Lenigas is a former managing director of Asia Energy

Contact

Website:

Resources

• Paul Murphy, Surrey oil hunt picks up where Esso let go, ft.com, October 5, 2014 2:03 pm