They call him the Gas King, though Julius Rone speaks more like an engineer than a monarch. At a recent energy conference in Cape Town, he stood before a sea of suits and said calmly, “We just need to get the gas right.” It was a modest sentence for an ambitious dream: Nigeria’s first floating liquefied natural gas project.
Rone, 51, leads UTM Offshore Limited, the Nigerian firm building the FLNG facility off the coast of Akwa Ibom. The project, backed by Japan Gas Corporation, France’s Technip Energies, and KBR in the United Kingdom, aims to turn “stranded gas” into export-ready energy. It is, in essence, Nigeria’s attempt to catch up with the world’s pivot to cleaner fuels.
He has been building toward this moment for years. A graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University and the University of Calabar, Rone cut his teeth in public service before steering UTM into a cluster of ventures, from energy to dredging, construction to logistics. The man who now leads a consortium of global engineers once began as a civil servant with a hunger for relevance.
Yet what sets him apart is not his portfolio, but his persistence. He speaks of “upstream, midstream, and downstream” as if describing a living organism, every part feeding the next. “You must have all the segments in one piece,” he tells anyone who will listen, “and the gas supply is the heart.” For him, the FLNG project is less a technical triumph than a national awakening.
Outside the boardroom, Rone’s other empire runs on goodwill. Through the Julius and Yutee Rone Foundation, he funds scholarships, health programs, and community drives. When the pandemic struck, he sent N20 million to Delta State’s relief efforts. On his 51st birthday, he gave instead of receiving.
It is easy to see why the industry calls him a changemaker. But for Rone, the title means little. He seems more preoccupied with the gas still trapped beneath the sea, waiting, like an idea, to take form and fire.
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