Dave Schulte, chairman, president, and CEO of CorEnergy Infrastructure Trust (NYSE: CORR), participated in a video interview at Nareit’s REITworld: 2019 Annual Conference in Los Angeles.
Schulte said that the energy sector has had a challenging capital markets environment over the last several years.
“That creates a lot of opportunity for CorEnergy because we provide an alternative way for companies to finance their permanent embedded assets,” Schulte said. “We own them…and then lease them back to [the companies], so they contain operating control.”
Schulte said this differentiates CorEnergy from lenders, other debt markets, and the common equity markets that companies are otherwise subject to.
Schulte also said CorEnergy believes it can close one to two new acquisitions in 2020, which would be a healthy number for the REIT.
“We’re more interested in the criticality of the assets we own to the production that the company has—less so to whether it’s specifically one commodity or another,” he added.
Schulte added that CorEnergy has a “significant amount of liquidity” on its balance sheet, around $250 million, so he’s confident heading into 2020.