Robert Rapier did not come to energy investing from a trading desk. He came to it from inside the plants.
Over two decades he worked across refining, natural gas production, gas-to-liquids, ethanol, and butanol. For six years at ConocoPhillips he ran a team of engineers in Scotland working on North Sea oil and gas projects. For
two years he was an efficiency expert at a Texas petrochemical plant, where the process changes he implemented saved the facility $9 million a year. He later served as engineering director for a Dutch environmental technology company, providing engineering support for a facility it was building in China. As a butanol engineer for Celanese in Germany, he designed a novel unit that cut production costs by $5 million a year.
That work produced five patents, including one for a breakthrough method of converting ethane into ethylene (U.S. Patent 7,074,977).
