One Restaurateur Transformed America’s Energy Industry

Charif Souki’s longshot bet on liquid natural gas, or L.N.G., paid off handsomely — and turned the United States into a leading fossil-fuel exporter.

If you wanted to tell the story of how the United States became one the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, you could start in the Middle Devonian period, around 400 million years ago, when a warm inland sea dense with primitive aquatic organisms covered parts of the northeastern United States and Appalachia; you could explain that as these creatures lived, reproduced and died, their remains settled on the ocean floor and were compressed beneath layers of sedimentary rock, until eventually they transformed into a gas trapped thousands of feet below what is now Pennsylvania.

Or you could start with the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.