The BOMA Project announced that Elsie Mbugua has joined the organization’s Board of Directors.
Elsie is the Founder of Elcy Investments Ltd with its power subsidiary Leadwood Energy; a specialist energy advisory company focused on renewable energy projects. She is also one of the financial transaction advisors to the Government of Kenya on the country’s crude oil and natural gas prospects and is considered a thought leader and a key policy maker in East Africa’s energy markets. She is well known for working on what she terms as ‘first of a kind’ energy transactions in the region. She has been involved in restructuring various parastatals in the country through Financial Independent Business Reviews, developing the framework for a local currency Power Purchase Agreement, negotiating the Heads of Terms for Kenya’s Upstream Crude Project and the sale of Kenya’s first crude oil cargo.
She was voted 2019 Young Emerging Energy Leader and also received an award recognition for her exceptional leadership in Africa’s energy sector. In 2020, her Firm was voted Best Renewable Energy Consulting Firm in East Africa by CV Magazine. Her thoughts on Africa’s energy transformation are widely published in numerous energy journals.
Elsie started her career as an energy trader and has more than a decade of experience as a physical energy trader for some of the world’s largest trading houses – Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan – covering markets in coal, emissions, power, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, and crude oil.
During her time as a trader, she participated in the first market-based effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US. She also assisted in the management and optimization of 3000 MW of power generating assets in California.
Her success at quickly learning the intricacies of physical energy markets as well as how to derive value from assets provided her with an opportunity to build J.P Morgan’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) business as lead North America LNG trader. The business had LNG import rights for up to 2 billion cubic feet per day of gas at the Cheniere Sabine Pass import terminal in Louisiana.
In 2012, she relocated to London as a physical crude oil trader covering the dated Brent and West African crude oil markets. She was one of the youngest physical oil traders in London.
In 2015, with her heart drawn to improving and transforming East Africa’s energy sector, she moved to Nairobi to start her energy entrepreneurship career. Today her firm is involved in some of the largest energy transactions in the region and plays a central role advising on Kenya’s energy policies.
In addition to this, Elsie was recently appointed to the Board of State Corporation Kenya Pipeline Company and made the chairlady of the Technical Committee. She is the founder of a US 501c3 called Ekenywa which builds water infrastructure projects with the goal of ensuring all public schools in Kenya have access to clean water. So far, more than 50,000 Kenyans rely on this infrastructure for their daily access to clean water.