Pine Brook, Comet Team Up In Energy JV
The private equity firm has participated in two other energy financings since last fall.
July 25, 2008
Pine Brook Road Partners has launched a new joint venture with Australian energy company Comet Ridge as part of a $100 million deal to extract oil and gas from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
The New York private equity firm, which disclosed its new joint venture with Melbourne, Australia-based Comet Ridge on Thursday, is providing up to $100 million to finance oil and gas exploration efforts in Florence, Colo. Terms call for Pine Brook, a firm that invests in energy and financial service businesses, to own a majority stake in the venture named Comet Ridge Resources.
Besides drilling in the Florence Oil Field, Comet Ridge Resources will also operate in the Pacific Northwest, principally in 425,000 acres of the Grays Harbor Basin of Washington State.
For Pine Brook Road, a private equity firm launched in 2006 and led by former Warburg Pincus energy heavyweight Howard Newman, the deal marks another backing of a domestic energy business since last fall. That’s when the firm participated in two separate equity-line investor group financings involving Houston-based Common Resources and a Southeast Asia business named Asia Pacific Exploration Consolidated.
Newman, President and CEO of Pine Brook, said Comet Ridge has meaningful intellectual property for exploring its acreage in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest. "The investment in Comet Ridge is consistent with our practice of providing growth capital to exceptional management teams in an effort to build companies of meaningful scale," he said in a statement.
In February, former JPMorgan Partners chief investment officer Arnold Chavkin joined Pine Brook as a managing director.
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