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Energy infrastructure is expensive to build, slow to pay back, and difficult to exit. Refineries, terminals, pipelines, and storage depots tie up capital for decades and carry operational costs that do not pause when margins compress. Full ownership of such assets brings full control, but it also concentrates risk, demands continuous capital allocation, and leaves an operator exposed to every cost overrun, regulatory shift, and market downturn without a partner to absorb the impact.
For an independently owned energy company growing without equity markets or state backing, the question of when to share ownership is not theoretical. The Prax Group's expansion across two decades produced a portfolio in which full ownership and shared stakes sat side by side, each reflecting a different calculation about where the risks lay, what the company needed from the asset, and what a partner brought that Prax could not replicate on its own.
Sanjeev Kumar Soosaipillai described that disposition toward risk as something he carried from the beginning. "I was always quite entrepreneurial," he recalled in a Prax publication. He also acknowledged that the scale Prax eventually operated required something beyond individual resolve.
The Capital Argument
The most straightforward case for a joint venture is capital. Acquiring a refinery outright, covering the processing units, the storage tanks, the associated terminal infrastructure, and the pipeline connections, requires a volume of capital that few independent operators can deploy without either taking on substantial debt or diluting their ownership base. A minority or co-ownership stake offers a different route: participation in the economics of a large asset for a fraction of the full acquisition cost.
Sanjeev was candid about how this thinking evolved. "You just live and learn," he said. "Sometimes, you do something two or three times before you realise you need to do it differently." The willingness to take a partial stake rather than hold out for full ownership reflected a matured understanding of what the company could finance and what structures would actually allow the asset to function.
The Prax Group's stated position on Lindsey, once acquired, was equally direct: "We acquired the asset to run it as a refinery, and through the right type of strategic investment, we will ensure that all units are running well, both now and in the future."
When Prax agreed to acquire a 36.36% stake in Natref Refinery in South Africa in 2024, it did so as a minority partner. Natref is an inland refinery in Sasolburg, Free State province, with a long operational history and an established position in the South African fuels market. The stake secured a foothold in a new continent, access to refinery economics, and a position in a market Prax had not previously operated in without requiring it to assume the full financial burden of sole ownership.
It also offered Prax exposure to a refinery of significant value without requiring the company to navigate sole ownership of an asset with its particular operational and geopolitical dependencies.
Shared Infrastructure and the Logic of Terminals
Refinery ownership and terminal ownership involve different questions. A refinery is a processing asset; its value depends on throughput, crude optimisation, and product slate decisions that are fundamentally operational. A terminal is primarily a logistics asset, its value derived from location, capacity, and connectivity. The ownership calculus differs accordingly.
When Prax acquired Lindsey Oil Refinery in March 2021, the transaction brought with it a set of joint venture positions in supporting infrastructure. These included a 60% stake in Hertfordshire Oil Storage Limited, and 50% stakes each in Associated Petroleum Terminals, Crude Oil Terminals, Humber Oil Terminals Trustee, and Warwickshire Oil Storage. None were sole-ownership positions. Each was a shared stake in infrastructure that served multiple operators simultaneously.
Sanjeev framed the Lindsey acquisition as the beginning of an active build-out rather than the completion of one. "It's an exciting next stage," he said in published commentary on the deal. "The Prax Group is very much still in a growth phase, and so we will continue to invest in the site every year to adapt the facility to improve safety and respond to the market." The shared terminal stakes were integral to that growth logic: "We now have a huge national presence for UK distributors to pick up oil supplies. We are a sizable player, and that scale means that we can service our clients much better, guaranteeing them both reliability and security of supply."
Terminals and storage depots serving multiple refineries, distributors, and fuel suppliers are more efficiently operated as shared assets than as captive infrastructure. Costs of maintenance, regulatory compliance, and capital reinvestment are distributed across participants, each of whom retains access to capacity without bearing the full cost of the facility's existence.
The Industry Cluster: A Different Kind of Shared Ownership
Joint ventures in refining and terminals involve assets that generate financial returns directly. An industry decarbonisation cluster represented a different kind of shared arrangement, one built around infrastructure whose value was regulatory and operational rather than commercial in the conventional sense.
Prax Lindsey Oil Refinery participated in one such cluster and the project centred on capturing CO₂ from participating industrial facilities and transporting it via pipeline to depleted gas fields beneath the North Sea. No single participant could have financed or operated the shared pipeline and storage infrastructure independently; the economic case depended on spreading the cost across enough contributors to make per-tonne abatement viable.
Sanjeev had spoken directly about the scale of the transition challenge facing the industry. "Our industry is facing tremendous challenges as it transitions towards a Net-Zero economy," he said. "The sector will use its extensive resources to decarbonise its activities and products with technologies such as hydrogen supply, energy storage and carbon capture utilisation and storage. The COVID-19 recovery process and the Net-Zero target need to be addressed as twin challenges in order to meet the UK's decarbonisation target in an efficient manner."
Participation in a shared infrastructure cluster was a concrete expression of how an operator could contribute to decarbonisation without bearing the full cost alone.
Arani Kumar Soosaipillai has spoken about the value of maintaining perspective when conditions shift. "Setbacks are inevitable, but how you respond to them defines your path forward," she said. "Persistence and maintaining a long-term perspective help navigate tough times". The Humber cluster represented precisely that orientation: shared ownership of decarbonisation infrastructure not because it was planned from the outset, but because the structure of the challenge made collective participation the only viable path.
What the Pattern Reveals
Examined across the Prax Group's portfolio, shared ownership appeared in three distinct situations: where full acquisition was capital-prohibitive, where shared infrastructure served multiple operators more efficiently than captive assets, and where collective investment was the only means of funding infrastructure that no single company would commission on its own.
Arani put the underlying logic plainly: "Sometimes, the best response to a challenge is getting fresh insight from someone else who has been through it before". That observation, made in general terms, described something specific about how Prax approached asset ownership: bringing in partners was not a concession to financial limitation but a recognition that the right counterparty could offer something that the company could not generate on its own.
Shared ownership was not a fallback position adopted when full ownership was unavailable. It was a recurring feature of how the company entered new markets, managed capital across a diversified portfolio, and participated in infrastructure too large or complex for any single operator to own alone. The joint venture question, on that reading, does not have a universal answer. It has a series of specific answers that depend on what the asset is, what the partner brings, what the company can afford, and what the alternative looks like.
