Gerry Willinger, founder and chief risk officer at OneNexus, believes there is an opportunity to branch out from the oil and gas sector in order to provide cover to different types of energy companies that might look to decommission their energy assets in the future.
“We certainly see opportunities coming in further energy transition, whether it’s class six carbon sequestration wells, solar decommissioning or wind turbine decommissioning, financial assurance for all those products,” Willinger said on the Global Captive Podcast.
“We think that there are multiple avenues to go down from a financial assurance standpoint as we build up our actuarial tables and our life tables.”
Willinger believes there are lots of similarities when it comes to energy transition.
“We like to think of the first step of transitioning to any form of energy or anything that changes is the ability to decommission the previous form,” he said.
In an interview with Captive Intelligence last December, Willinger noted that OneNexus was planning to double the $1.2bn in funding it was providing to oil and gas companies to help them decommission their liabilities.
“The target is to be able to go to much higher levels,” he said. “We have a pretty aggressive pipeline right now from a size standpoint, and so it just depends upon whether some large decommissioning underwriting comes in or not.”
Williger said OneNexus has been looking at decommissioning opportunities ranging from $1m of gross liabilities to $255m. “But I see us building our book consistently throughout the year,” he said.
OneNexus currently utilises a multi-cell captive structure domiciled in Oklahoma.
“That multi-cell captive allows us to segregate the risk depending on the client,” Willinger said.
“The ability to separately manage accounts was important to us. So, one of the cells could be an offshore cell that has a very different risk profile and duration than some of the other cells that we have.”
The company currently only has one cell, but he anticipates there could be around four by the end of the year.