Richard Rodriguez
Jordan Jayson sounds like a kid at Christmas talking about, well, Christmas.
“The Santa Claus is 60 feet long with reindeer across the roof,” Jayson says while we sit in an office conference room. “And Santa, I think, is 16 feet high. So, that'll be going in. And that's very exciting.”
Jayson, chairman and CEO of U.S. Energy Development Corp., is talking about the external Christmas décor of his company’s new building in the Stockyards.
The company is repurposing the historic Armour Building. It is expected to be ready by, wait for it, December.
All of this, the new building and going all “Christmas Vacation” is a special honor to his parents, whom he took the company over from upon their deaths within months of one another in 2014.
“My mother was not quite Clark Griswold, but a competitor,” Jayson says. “My mother had a passion for Christmas lights. My mother and father were in real estate for their entire careers and oil and gas for most of their careers. My father had a passion for these types of projects as far as the building style and the historic nature of it.
“I’m trying to make both of them happy. It's been a fun project.”
Jayson is a member of Fort Worth Inc.’s The 400, the list of the city’s and Greater Fort Worth’s most influential people.
He said he decided to move its base of operations closer to those assets, which include holdings in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale.
“We had a couple of historic partners from Fort Worth, and I had been visiting Fort Worth for close to 15 years, had always loved the city, loved the people, and also enjoyed the history of the city as well,” says Jayson, who earned an MBA from TCU. “So, it just felt like a great home to reestablish the firm.”
In total, the company has invested in or operated about 4,000 wells in 13 states and Canada.
The company recently announced that it is making an even bigger plunge into the Permian Basin over the next year.
Over the next 12 months, officials said the company expects to deploy upwards of $750 million, with the majority of this capital earmarked for projects in the Permian.
“It's the premier basin for oil and gas in the country, if not the world,” Jayson says. “And we continue to make progress there by acquiring new projects. We don't see that slowing down over the next one to three years.
“There's been a lot of consolidation in the Permian Basin over the last 24 to 36 months, which provides a potential opportunity for a firm our size to take on smaller projects that may not be as lucrative for some of the larger firms to hopefully partner with them or acquire assets in the Permian Basin.”
