Gasoline in the U.S. Northeast has quietly acquired a Russian relation. Lukoil is about to take off the mask.
Drivers pulling into a Getty station in the U.S. believe they are buying gas from the legacy assets of one of America's more eccentric oilmen, Jean Paul Getty. Likewise with the familiar red, white and blue Mobil sign: That means the merged Exxon, right? Not in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The man now behind those familiar banners is Vagit Alekperov, head of Lukoil, owner of 2,100 gas stations from Maine to Virginia and some of Russia's richest oilfields.Alekperov is known as "the quiet oligarch," but there is nothing quiet about his ambitions. "The seven sisters should look out because they now have a brother," he said almost ten years ago. Lukoil has grown fourfold since Alekperov, a former Soviet oil minister, created it by consolidating state oil rights in the chaotic days after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has not yet achieved his goal of turning Lukoil into a globally integrated oil giant, but he does have the makings. Lukoil has 20 billion barrels of proven hydrocarbon reserves, more than any other oil company except ExxonMobil.
With all that oil in the ground, Alekperov has spent a decade looking for ways to sell it. He set up thousands of service stations around the former Soviet states and then set his sights on the U.S. What better place to peddle petrol than a nation of gas-guzzlers? His aim is to build a company that extends "from Russia's oilfields to the gas tanks of American cars," he says.
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The Russian energy minister and his U.S. counterpart have been meeting several times a year. "We are always a part of those meetings," says Vadim Gluzman, chief executive of Lukoil's U.S. unit. "The U.S. government is interested in diversifying energy sources."
Gluzman, a 42-year-old Russian emigre, is mysterious about how he met Alekperov. He is an intriguing figure to be running what is already a $2.2 billion business. Murky about his curriculum vitae since coming to the U.S. (he only acknowledges a post with a Rhode Island garden hose maker), Gluzman himself appears to fit the post-Soviet business model, an engineer by training who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right idea. He has no experience in retail or energy, but he helped pull off the first Russian takeover of a listed American company with the purchase of Getty Petroleum Marketing four years ago.
