How old is grant king origin

In that latter role, Energy Markets has developed an increasingly strong competitive position with growing earnings, cash flow and returns and is well placed strategically to lead a transition in Australian energy markets to a less carbon intensive future. This will lead to the opportunity for further strategic and structural choices.

With this in mind the appointment of Mr Calabria is both timely and appropriate. The chairman, Gordon Cairns, defended the share rights award by arguing they have vesting periods of four to five years, and Mr King would "only receive value from the [options and rights] if you as shareholders do well".

Origin has invested heavily in a gas export project in Queensland, which is now being brought into full production with a turnaround in the group's performance hinging on a rise in the price of oil, which will also flow through to higher gas prices. How that changes its net profit will not be clarified until the company releases its December half earnings in February. The head of the group's energy markets division, Frank Calabria, is to replace Mr King as chief executive from Thursday. Recognising early the potential of Queensland's vast coal seam gas resource, he picked up resources on the cheap, gradually building on his strategy of creating an integrated energy supply business.

McCann credits King with the foresight of anticipating the importance of coal seam gas and its potential as a feedstock for LNG. King also comes in for a share of the general criticism levelled at the three Queensland LNG ventures that stubbornly went ahead with hugely costly separate, stand-alone export projects side-by-side on Gladstone's Curtis Island rather than amalgamating into a more capital-efficient, streamlined venture, with a smaller capacity and shared utilities.

APLNG was not the only decision during the latter stages of King's tenure at Origin that investors and some former executives struggle with. Indeed one former long-term senior manager points to a string of investments in assets ranging from geothermal energy in Indonesia to hydroelectricity in Patagonia and Papua New Guinea that seemed to make little sense.

Leaving aside the commodity market move, the price looked ridiculously generous for a resource that offered only long-term potential at best and was being acquired from a cash-strapped seller running short of options. Several of Origin's peers also caught out by the two-thirds dive in oil prices between mid and early , with Santos even worse hit, while BHP Billiton is still dealing with the fallout from its equally ill-timed plunge into shale.

Yet judging by the numbers, King still served shareholders well overall, despite the 75 per cent slump in Origin's share price between September and early When Origin began ASX listed life on February 21, , King was already six years into his year affair with what would become Origin. He had been lured away from AGL in , attracted by the then new Boral chief executive, Tony Berg, and the former Macquarie banker's ambitions in energy. Sydney's gas company was King's first employer.

Evidently, the man is a real sticker. So too was his faithful executive companion Karen Moses. She arrived at Boral just months after King and her retirement as finance director preceded his by just five months.

It is unlikely we will see that sort of enduring partnership again in an Australian listed company. The seeds of Boral's energy ambitions were sown a year before King was poached from AGL with the publication of the legendary Hilmer Report.

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review a few hours before his farewell cocktail party last Thursday evening, King reflected that Origin specifically, and the Australian energy markets more broadly, is a direct product of Hilmer's profound redefinition of the structure of competition in Australia.

Because that stands the most obvious proof that these reviews do make a real difference. Not immediately but over time, [Fred] Hilmer changed the energy sector," King said. The King view is that the sector we see today is a direct result of Hilmer recommendations that bought deregulation of the energy sector and that introduced the national access regimes that made wide-scale privatisation both politically sustainable and economically rational.

Whether intended or not, there is a very particular timeliness to King's observations on the shaping potential of the government policy that emerges from independent review. South Australia's pre-Grand Final collapse into power blackout has triggered a collection of reviews and inquires that aim to assess how the system collapsed, what role renewables and the unavailability of more conventional domestic peaking back-up played in that break-down, and to offer advice on how Australia's network might be made more resilient as we drive to an ever more renewable-energy future.

At the same time, successive reviews of the East Coast gas market by the Australian Energy Market Commission and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission have inspired a COAG blueprint for reforms of the market structure and laws governing gas and its distribution.