Veteran oilman Bob Simpson ushered a new venture to the New York Stock Exchange Friday when Fort Worth-based TXO Energy Partners made its stock market debut.
Simpson, who founded XTO Energy and led it until the company merged with ExxonMobil in 2010 in a deal valued at $41 billion, rang the opening bell along with other company executives. The company planned to sell 5 million shares at $20 each, netting an estimated $88 million in proceeds after deducting underwriting costs.
Its shares rose 10% to close Friday at $22. They trade under the ticker TXO.
TXO is a renamed version of Simpson’s MorningStar Partners oil and gas company, which he founded in 2012. A 45-year oil veteran, Simpson started Cross Timbers Oil Co. in 1986 and that company later became XTO Energy, the nation’s largest natural gas producer.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/67UXT4QTONA6NC7XEXGT45B4B4.jpg)
Simpson and fellow oil magnate Ray Davis also became major league baseball owners in 2010 as lead investors in a $593 million winning bid to take the Texas Rangers out of bankruptcy. They serve as co-chairs of the team’s board of directors.
The Rangers’ value is now estimated to be $2.05 billion.
He’s also a major donor to Baylor University, his alma mater, and rare coin collector, listing one last year for private sale for $5.5. million.
TXO’s holdings of 370,000 net acres are concentrated in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico and the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado. Its reserves totaled 130 million barrels of oil equivalent at the end of 2021, according to its regulatory filings before trading started.
Simpson and the company’s management team have invested more than $500 million in the business, according to the filing. It described the oil patches where TXO operates as “characterized by low geologic risk, low decline rates and high recoveries relative to drilling and completion costs.”
The company’s revenue topped $278 million in 2021, with $64 million in profit. Through nine months of 2022, its revenue totaled $204 million, the latest data included in its regulatory filings.
