Peter Mackey had only worked with his new Avenir colleagues for a couple of months before the world was plunged into lockdowns and a new, largely virtual business world.
He was first appointed as chief commercial officer in January 2020, but not much has changed going into his second year — this time as chief executive — with his team still largely working from home.
Mackey, with a faint Irish accent still detectable, has had an international upbringing. He grew up in the Netherlands, went to high school in Switzerland and has worked in the US.
He characterises himself as “an ageing sportsman” and an enthusiastic golfer, skier and rugby player, although he claims to be not very good at any of them. Downtime is spent with his kids or playing golf — although UK lockdowns are preventing him from hitting the fairways at present.
Consulting passion
Mackey graduated as a chemical engineer. But, he said, much to his mother’s disappointment, he chose to follow his interests and went on to spend the first 10 years of his career working in corporate strategy in the energy sector, first with Accenture and then EY.
“I was really passionate about getting into consulting,” Mackey said, adding that he was interested in energy and enjoyed the challenge of strategy.
In 2011, he joined Wood Mackenzie to gain further energy-sector specialism. There he ran the gas and power consulting business, spending the bulk of his time on project development or advisory, principally in gas and LNG, with much of his work focused on LNG-import project development.
After four years, he shifted to US multinational GE as managing director for its gas to power team.
Here Mackey led the development of Bangladesh’s floating storage and regasification unit-based Summit LNG import project, and got to know the key regas players such as Excelerate Energy, Golar LNG and Hoegh LNG.
When Avenir came calling last year, he said: “It was just too good an opportunity to miss.”
Mackey described Avenir as “a relatively small organisation, with a huge growth trajectory in front of it, and a very, very strong set of shareholders which have made a big commitment to developing the company".
He added: “It's just been exciting."
