Ever since crude first gushed from Spindletop Hill in 1901, Houston has been an oil town — the epicentre of America’s oil and gas industry, its fortunes rising and falling with those of the sector.
Today, though, America’s fourth-largest city is rapidly expanding beyond the industry on which it was built. Not only has it become a centre for green energy innovation, but other sectors, including medical technology and aerospace, now call the Texas city home.
“When I grew up in this city, it was oil and gas,” says Sylvester Turner, the city’s mayor. “When I went to law school at Harvard and told people I was from Houston, Texas, many students . . . thought I had an oil well in my backyard.”
Now, Houston’s transformation to an international hub for a growing number of multinational corporations — backed by one of the nation’s busiest international airports and global shipping ports — has helped propel the city to the top of the second annual FT-Nikkei Investing in America rankings.
“We are still an energy-focused town,” notes Turner. “But we are that and so much more.”
“We’re clear in Houston that if we’re going to continue to have prosperity — to the degree to define prosperity as job growth and wealth creation — it’s going to need to come from places other than the incumbent energy business,” says Bobby Tudor, chief executive of Artemis Energy Partners and a leading corporate voice in the city.
McKinsey, the consultancy, has estimated that the city could grow its share of energy transition capital from about 6 per cent in 2020 to as much as 15 per cent by 2040, reaching $250bn annually.
“Increasingly, people working in the energy transition space are saying, you know, actually where the action is, is here,” says Tudor. “It’s not really San Francisco. It’s not really Boston. It’s Houston, Texas.”
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