Longtime Innovator Casts Investments to the Wind

Selim Zilkha is investing in wind power as the next energy growth area. And, because Zilkha has made shrewd choices before, wind bears watching.

The 73-year-old Zilkha, who now lives in Los Angeles, has formed Zilkha Renewable Energy with his son Michael, who heads the Houston-based company. The firm is investing in wind-generating projects in California, Costa Rica and offshore Britain. Adoption of wind power is growing in the U.S. and abroad. It generates 10% of Denmark’s electricity, Zilkha says.

Zilkha has innovated before. After losing some $30 million in a small U.S. energy company in 1983, Zilkha took over the firm, renamed it Zilkha Energy and pushed the use of three-dimensional seismic technology, using supercomputers to find gas in the Gulf of Mexico.

Buying in when most other oil and gas prospectors were selling, Zilkha Energy accumulated leases in the gulf. . Then, to tap into capital to develop the leases, Zilkha sold his company to Sonat Inc. in 1998 for $1 billion.

When Sonat was acquired the following year by El Paso Corp., Zilkha became the largest shareholder in El Paso. Today, he and family trusts own more than $900 million worth of El Paso stock.

Selim Zilkha is a member of a merchant family that got its start in modern international money circles with a small bank in 1890s Baghdad. It’s a family that dates to the biblical times of “Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonian captivity,” according to “From Baghdad to Boardrooms,” a book on the family by Ezra Zilkha, Selim’s brother.

The family left Iraq in the 1920s and, after World War II, set up in New York, Paris and London, where Selim in 1962 pioneered the use of computers in inventory control when he founded Mothercare, a British chain of maternity stores that spread throughout Europe.

Watch the wind.