Sitting in a central London boardroom, surrounded by geological maps of the North Sea 's many remaining offshore gas fields, John Knight tries to sound modest.
The founder of Neo Next+, the juggernaut that has surpassed BP and Harbour Energy to become the North Sea's largest oil and gas producer, claims zero interest in personal profile-building.
Knight, 68, has flown under the radar for decades, and rarely speaks publicly. But he is now one of the most influential figures in Britain's oil and gas industry.
"I don't like over-personalisation," he says briskly. "I don't really want to talk about me. I want to talk about Neo Next+."
But explaining the workings of the UK's North Sea without Knight and Neo would be a struggle – and in reality he is more than happy to talk about both.
Neo was founded in 2019, meaning its rise coincided almost exactly with Westminster's efforts to shut down the North Sea oil and gas industry.
Both main parties adopted net-zero targets and approved windfall levies that raised taxes on North Sea operators to 78pc, culminating in Ed Miliband's ban on new drilling .
The result has been a mass departure of oil majors, but where they saw economic disaster, Knight and his partners at Norwegian private-equity firm HitecVision saw an opportunity.
Since then, Knight and his team have spearheaded 16 consecutive acquisitions and mega-mergers that have turned Neo from a start-up into the UK North Sea's biggest player.
It produces almost double the output of its closest rivals such as Adura, the joint venture containing Shell and Equinor's UK assets.
While Adura has spent two years battling courts, NGOs and hostile ministers to win licences for the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, which Andy Burnham's Government has yet to approve , Neo has expanded far faster.
Over the same period, Neo's deals with Repsol UK and French supermajor TotalEnergies have given it control of 110 of the UK's 250 or so remaining active oil and gas fields.
Those fields are pumping the equivalent of 250,000 barrels of oil a day, with about half of that being gas that goes into UK pipes.
"We designed our plan around 12 existing hubs, all licensed," he says. "That is smack-bang in the middle of current Labour policy."
"This year, we will invest just below $1bn [£750m] on that kind of North Sea drilling and aim to keep that level of investment through to the end of 2031, regardless of what happens to Jackdaw or Rosebank."
That approach also means Neo produces three times as much as BP, which recently put all its UK assets up for sale for an estimated £2bn.
Will Knight try to snap those up too? He won't say, but the gleam in his eye suggests he is keen.
"I can't speak about BP," he says. "But it has been very public that it's considering an exit from UK waters .
"Neo Next is a joint venture wholly dedicated to the UK ... We look at every opportunity to expand. I can't talk about specifics, but if we're able to put in place the right sort of financial engineering, and we believe the assets can be fundamentally improved, then we'll look at every possibility to do that."
Neither Neo nor Knight has a strong public profile, so where did they come from?
Knight began in law, qualified as a barrister, then moved to Shell's legal department in 1981.
Later, he moved into investment banking, specialising in oil and gas, before a long spell at Norwegian state-controlled energy giant Statoil, now Equinor.
'Pendulum swing back'
But his 2018 move to Stavanger-based HitecVision marked the beginning of what is now Neo.
Surveying the UK, his team saw a sector beset by pessimism and a "green panic".
Companies such as BP and Shell, facing aggressive net-zero policies, were moving toward renewables, with BP even pledging a 40pc cut in fossil fuel output by 2030.
Knight decided Neo would adopt the exact opposite approach.
He says: "Our view was that there would be a pendulum-swing back as the realities of the costs of the energy transition emerged."
That same green swing had left many smaller oil and gas companies struggling to raise money from ESG-conscious lenders.
That enabled Neo's early bargain takeovers of companies, such as Deltic Energy and Zennor Petroleum.
"Smaller players like Deltic," whose offices in Waterloo, central London, we were sitting in, "had interesting discoveries, but they weren't able to raise capital."
So where did Neo get its money? Knight is coy: "They're all household names, typical private-equity investors. Two thirds are American, a lot are Ivy League-type university foundations."
Knight's team also saw a separate opportunity in the exit of US oil majors simply because North Sea fields were dwindling.
"They wanted a bigger bang for their buck," said Knight.
Change in legislation
Knight concedes, however, that Neo also owes its success to an obscure but vital change in UK legislation.
The Finance Act 2019 let buyers of ageing oil and gas assets "inherit" the seller's past corporation tax payments. This meant the new owner could claim Treasury rebates to cover future decommissioning liabilities.
"Without the Finance Act of 2019, we would not have built Neo," Knight reveals. "The decommissioning bill for Neo over the next four decades is $10bn. But Neo will only pay $2.5bn ... It was absolutely seminal."
That change set the stage for Neo's rise, with the biggest moves coming in 2025 and 2026: deals with Repsol UK and TotalEnergies, both now major shareholders.
'Geology is not the problem'
Why, though, does Knight have faith in the future of the UK's North Sea when others have given up?
Earlier this month, Anders Opedal, Equinor's boss, made headlines by warning that battles about developments such as Rosebank and Jackdaw had made the UK North Sea "uninvestable".
Knight, who shared a drink with his former Equinor colleague the evening before, rejects that narrative.
"With all the greatest respect to Anders, I fundamentally disagree," Knight says. "It is not the North Sea that is uninvestable. New oil and gas projects are uninvestable. Those are two completely different situations.
"The North Sea potentially has decades of oil and gas left to give. The geology is not the problem; it's the politics and policies we have to get right."
He means that while the Labour Government ties new schemes in political knots, Neo is exploiting Burnham's pledge to "be pragmatic" by allowing production from already licensed fields.
About 180 miles out in the North Sea, a giant oil production and storage vessel, known as Global Producer III, shows what that can mean in practice.
Previous owner TotalEnergies planned to decommission the vessel, wiping out 90 jobs and closing three underlying oil fields, but it has stayed in operation.
Neo has also green-lit other projects international oil majors rejected under capital rationing, such as infill wells on the North Sea's veteran Claymore oil field.
Other projects that do need licences have been put on ice in hopes of a policy or government change. "I can't invest billions on the back of ambiguity," Knight admits.
"For new fields to open, the Government must phase out the windfall tax , speed up approvals, and drop the hostile rhetoric. But we won't pack up and leave; even under our current portfolio, Neo will be producing from the UK North Sea until 2060."
